


Of Love and Faith And Other Deadly Things

by ARogueGambit7



Category: American Gods (TV)
Genre: Developing Relationship, F/M, Falling In Love, Idiots in Love, Mad Sweeney Needs a Hug (American Gods), Multi, Rough Sex, Semi-Public Sex
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-31
Updated: 2021-03-06
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:54:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 22,606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26215192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ARogueGambit7/pseuds/ARogueGambit7
Summary: Laura Moon has been a dead girl, a pawn, a footnote in someone else's story. But stories are for the rewriting, and when love, faith, and other deadly weapons are involved, even gods must make new plans.
Relationships: Laura Moon & Mad Sweeney, Laura Moon/Mad Sweeney
Comments: 33
Kudos: 50





	1. Caointhe and Cold Coins

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which grieving is begun, most rudely interrupted, and then abandoned altogether.

**Caointhe and Cold Coins**

Laura doesn’t remember when Sweeney’s body becomes too heavy to bear anymore.

It shouldn’t have been. She was able to toss him ass-over-tea kettle without breaking a sweat before, and that was when he was a breathing, swearing, six-foot-plus tree of a leprechaun. Or whatever he was.

Was.

Laura draws in breath through force of habit and wonders why she bothers. With any of it. _I mean, where are you planning to go?_

Some vague part of her thinks “New Orleans” and then instantly shies away. They’d given her whatever help they could, if it even was help. She hadn’t had the chance to find out, and the thought of showing up on the doorstep of Le Coq Noir carrying the (man? Leprechaun? Traveling companion? Friend?) she’d come with makes something in her not already frozen go even colder. She can just imagine the sly, mocking looks the death loa would give her if she went begging on their charity again.

The thought that the looks might be of sympathy is something she doesn’t countenance. 

“God dammit.”

Laura veers to the side of the road, stomping over some field just like every damn field so far. Night has hit hard, and she can’t see what it looks like much beneath her feet as she lays Sweeney’s body down. She plans to do it rough — has a vague idea that if she is as annoying to him in his death as she was in life (his, not hers) that he’ll open his eyes from sheer frustration, too vexed to be dead. But somehow it comes out all wrong, gentle and careful, and she has the sense there are flowers beneath him, when she can damn well see there aren’t. 

“You and me, Ginger Minge. Guess now you know what it feels like. And I get to know what you smell like. Didn’t think it could be worse than warmed over gin, but you would rise to the occasion.”

It’s not quite true — rot hasn’t set in yet, and he mostly smells of blood — too much of it and not enough. She reaches into his pocket for a cigarette and thoroughly ignores her shaking hands. 

“So what’s the plan?”

She lights the cigarette and inhales, blowing out ash and smoke. She’s using her right hand to do it, so it has to be her left that finds the bottle.

“Fuck you.”

She’s saying it to him, looking at the point on his chest where the wound is, very much not at his face. “This was your answer? You felt you owed Wednesday enough to handle his dirty laundry, to kill for him, and then you felt you owed it yourself to get killed by him?” She doesn’t mention Shadow – somehow, to her, it still all goes back to Wednesday. “Well, fuck you. You think I’m gonna give up my chance at a new life so you can once again fuck up yours?”

She stands up, to put some distance between herself and the silently judgy corpse. “Everything about my unlife is your fault, you deranged fairytale.” It’s a masterful shifting of blame, but Laura chooses consciously not to care. She’s too angry with him. “You know, you’re lucky your dead – because I probably would have killed you myself if I had to spend five more minutes in your mindfuck excuse for company.”

The irony of telling a dead leprechaun he’s lucky to be dead is so ridiculous that somehow it’s the straw that breaks the dead girl’s back. Laura Moon screams and throws her cigarette on his chest. It’s snuffed out by the congealing blood, and the bottle suddenly becomes way too heavy in her hand. She still refuses to look at it, but her newly free right hand moves to the stopper.

“You in need of some assistance?”

Laura turns, and the four men are just visible, black and white and dull against the night. The one who spoke is a head taller than her, with ruddy features and a beat-up leather jacket. His attempt at a shit-eating grin is so pale in comparison to the one she’s grown used to that she can’t keep back a scoff. The man’s brow furrows. “What was that?”

“Nothing to concern yourself with, Hot Rod. Just—” _Saying goodbye? Trying not to? Trying…_

“That was rude,” Hot Rod insists, stepping forward, his boys – she can’t think of them as anything else – flanking her. “Here we are, offering a lady assistance, and you wanna throw names?”

His attempt at menace is so laughable, after everything she’s seen, that she can’t keep in a small, derisive laugh. Hot Rod scowls and lurches forward. Laura doesn’t move an inch and can see how it rattles him. He’s only a little taller than her – taller, not towering – and she smiles up at him with venomous sweetness. “Trust me – if names is all I’m throwing, consider yourself lucky.”

Fuck, that word again. She’ll have to not use it. She’s expecting a grab, or a punch – hoping for them, if she’s honest, a fight right about now sounds wonderful – and her gaze is on Hot Rod. That’s why she doesn’t see it coming – she’s expecting bluster and blow, not tricky fingers, not the slyness of a thief. It takes a second to register that her left hand is lighter but it’s a second too late.

“What’s this?”

Laura can see the bottle in the hand of Hot Rod’s friend, and it’s all she sees. She doesn’t register the thief’s looks, his paltry height, his sandy hair (it’s all colorless to her anyway). But the bottle is somehow vivid, tiny as it is. “Give that back,” she demands.

“Whoa!” Hot Rod laughs and his idiot friends echo him. “Touchy, now. What’s in it that’s so special?”

“It’s mine,” she snarls. She steps towards the sandy-haired thief and he tosses the bottle deftly. She watches it arc and swears something in her skips a beat it doesn’t have, before Hot Rod catches it.

“Mine now,” Hot Rod brags, and the irony of it, the unfair fairness of it, makes her laugh, a bitter thing. Hot Rod grins back at her, as if this is some game, as if she won’t rip his face off and mail it to his mother. “This your little pick-me up?”

It’s so close to the truth ( _You give me truth…I give you what you want_ ) that Laura can’t take it. “Just give it back.”

Hot Rod scoffs, tossing it from hand to hand. “And what’ll you give me?”

 _Both your kidneys, pulped so you can drink them_. “We can work something out,” she says instead, flashing the big eyes and the soft smile that served her so well throughout her life in getting bigger, dumber men to do what she needed them to. Hot Rod raises a brow, and its such a piss-poor imitation of his, that she can’t hold the smile. Something vicious and feral and honest slips out, and Hot Rod takes a step back. There’s fear on his face, and Laura can very nearly taste it. She likes it.

“Bitch, what are you _on_?”

 _Fumes, gold, vengeance, loathing, love_ —“Give. It. Back.”

Hot Rod is scared, there’s an edge to the air, metallic and storm-hung, that she likes, and she’s so close to getting what she wants (violence? Redemption? Blood?) that she’s surprised, for the second time this night, when Hot Rod does the unthinkably stupid.

“Bitch, _fuck_ you.”

The vial glistens in his hand as he lifts and lobs it, and Laura is still watching it when it hits the ground, when his boot comes down.

The crack goes through her like limbs ripping, like a thunderclap above, like the rending and tearing of something in her cold, hard chest. She screams like she never has before, a high-pitched, raw, resounding chord of violence that she doesn’t recognize from herself and launches at the man.

His idiotic face is still wearing that surprised, arrogant expression when she splits it, and his insides gush upward like a geyser. It comes down to drench her, painting horror all over her corpse. It isn’t enough.

Two men rush her, bigger and burlier, and she almost thanks God for it – any god – as she grabs one by the throat and _pulls_. She doesn’t know the name for everything that comes out, but she’s pretty sure part of it is his spleen, and most of it is blood, soaking, swelling blood. The other man lands a punch to her upper back, and she takes it, relishes it, because when she whirls and smashes her fist into his chest it goes straight through his heart, to the pulsing, beating, living organ in his chest. She can _feel_ it die, and it is glorious, perfect, as close to alive as she can remember coming since, since…

The last one is running now, rightfully afraid. She could let him go but she can’t, of course she can’t, and it only takes two bounding steps for her to catch the sandy haired thief, the cause of all of this. He’s blubbering and begging, and it means fuck all to Laura when she kicks his back in. That is probably enough to kill him, but not enough to assuage the tearing, shrieking lust pounding through her revivified body.

_Blood, blood, blood, blood…_

She cuts an arm along his body lengthwise, and his head comes off, severed clumsily from his neck. She catches it by the hair, not so sandy now, and with a last roar throws it down, where it makes a dent in the ground.

Laura is heaving, though of course there’s no air, and she’s wet with blood, none of it hers. Of course not – she probably can’t fucking bleed.

_Which makes it all pointless, doesn’t it?_

She turns in a slow circle, taking in the four bodies.

Four.

“No. No, no, and—”

She counts again, ranges around them, stomping through the muck and gore. She can locate Hot Rod, sandy-hair, and the detritus of the two meatheads. But that’s all there is – four dead humans and puddles of blood all around. No matter how she tries, she can’t make four add up to five.

Sweeney is gone.

“No, no, no, _no_!”

“My, my, my, _my_ , Miss Moon. What a glorious mess we’ve made here.”


	2. Fuil and Phantoms

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which our (heroine? Oh dear, she wouldn't wish to be called that) -- in which our necromantic protagonist, Ms. Moon, makes a new acquaintance. (I daresay, I suspect they shall become fast friends!)

**Fuil and Phantoms**

Laura doesn’t recognize the voice, feminine and smoky and rough and lilting, but she knows that feel, that tone. Even before she turns to see the figure – lean and ropey and harshly beautiful, with long black hair and high boots and an outfit that looks like it was designed for a dominatrix specializing in bikers, swirling tattoos all along her arms – before she looks up into the angled face with the long nose, taunting smile and eyes that Laura can tell are black even to those who see color – she knows.

She fucking _knows_ , and it’s the last goddamn – _gods_ damn – straw. “Where. The Fuck. Is. He?”

The god smiles, and it’s a slash in her old-young face. There’s a scar that runs down the left side, from brow to jaw, and only on an immortal would it make her look more beautiful. Her lips curl up and Laura knows, without needing to see it, that they are deepest red. “No more manners than a sluagh.” The goddess tsks. “Bíonn na cinn nua drochbhéasach i gcónaí.”

Laura is vibrating now with fresh anger, and from the way the black-haired goddess grins, the bitch knows it. “Listen. I don’t know how you got here—"

“You summoned me.”

Laura has to laugh at that, a rough, cawing sound. “Like fuck.”

The black-haired goddess only looks more amused. “Oh yes, dead girl. I heard you loud and clear, like bombs and bluster, like a thousand funerals and a splintering spirit. You called old Badh Catha, and here she be.”

“I don’t want you.”

“Oh, _I_ know.” The goddess appears delighted now. “But I’m here now, and it’s rude you’re being to a lady you called up on sudden notice without even knowing her name.”

“I didn’t summon you!”

The goddess laughs in her face. “Why, of course you did. Keening and wailing and spilling blood all over the ground in your agony – what were you trying to call up? Other than that giant, ridiculous oaf? T’were it him, you’d be better off spilling brandy on the grass than blood.”

That one hurts, and it’s so unfair, and so true, that Laura slams her boot down into one of the dead men’s arms, pulping it. “You know? I think I’m finally fucking done with gods.”

“Are you now?”

The lack of response, of fear, is getting to her. Laura curls her fists. “Yeah. And you can keep grinning like a maniac, Biker Chic, but what you don’t know? Is that I’ve killed a god. And it. Felt. Great.”

The goddess has the nerve to look positively gleeful at the prospect of more violence. “I suppose you think you can manage it now?”

Laura is smarter than this – usually, in a usual world. Impulsive, yes, but she’s far from dumb. She knows the goddess wants this, knows it’s playing into yet another immortal’s hands. But none of that stops her fist from shooting out.

The goddess waits till the last moment to dodge. Laura rushes in again, bringing up her elbow, and the goddess swipes it aside, black eyes wide, red mouth grinning. A kick is neatly stepped aside, and another blow at the goddess’ head meets air.

Laura knows she’s clumsy, relying on brute, undead strength against a being that has clearly been fighting for centuries. She should be dead by now, or at least dismembered, but the god-bitch is clearly pulling her punches. She’s being played with like she’s a toy, flimsy and breakable and human. Yet another god dangling her life – such as it is – around on a puppet string. That scream comes out of her yet again, _fuck this,_ and then she’s launched herself on top of the laughing goddess.

They tumble into the blood-wet ground, rolling around before hitting a stone. Laura is raging and the goddess is laughing, and so as soon as they stop Laura lands a punch. She can’t tell if it draws blood, there’s so much of it around, but the immortal laps her lip and smiles. “That’s a darling. And what now?”

Laura seethes, and snatches up the rock. It’s really more a boulder, but just about fits in her hand. She raises it, ready to see if rock beats god. The hand that slams into her chin is viper fast, and the strike to her gut makes whatever is decaying in it roil. Laura finds herself flipped over onto her knees in two lightning swift moves, both arms pinned behind her back.

“Now, now, now,” croons the goddess, wild black braids falling around Laura’s head as she leans in from behind. “Murder is poor payment for such a favor as you’ve been given. Did no one ever teach you manners, Laura Moon?”

Laura spits out whoever’s blood is in her mouth. “Eat shit.”

The being behind her huffs a sigh. “Suppose it falls to me then, pup.” Laura’s hair is wrenched back, her neck up, and she can see the glint of a blade. Somehow, she can feel the edge at her throat. Somehow, she knows if it slices across, this blade will make her well and truly dead.

“Any famous last words?” the goddess purrs. Laura closes her eyes, ready to see darkness.

“Aye,” the voice rumbles out through the black, his brogue lilting and familiar and deadly. “Ar ais amach, Morrigan, you feathered cunt.”


	3. Olc and Oaths

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Laura has cause to rejoice, and also to not; a certain someone returns; promises are made; and all become the dearest of friends.

**Olc and Oaths**

Laura is afraid.

It’s idiotic, of course. But like a little girl unwilling to break the hold of a dream, she’s somehow sure if she opens her eyes it’ll be over – a trick, or a lie, anything but his voice.

“Tá sé. Well met, Lámfada. Lovely night for it.”

“Hands off, Morrigan. Or I’ll break them both.”

“Ooh, he’s in a _mood_ isn’t he, Miss Moon?”

Laura can feel the knife as the goddess bends further down, can hear wind and wailing as she whispers, “Such a lovely rush isn’t it, wondering just what he’ll do.’

“Don’t need to wonder about it – step over here and I’ll demonstrate.”

“And let go my prize?”

“She ain’t yours.”

Laura swallows over the blade, something thrumming through her at those rumbled words. But she still can’t look.

“I might beg to differ,” the goddess lilts. “She screamed up a murder of pain and vicious bloodshed, spilled all over the ground like a queen’s feast. I but came to drink it.” The goddess presses the tip of her blade to Laura’s chin, and lowers her voice to murmur in her ear. “Now why doncha open those pretty grey undead eyes and see what you’ve bought with it.”

The last thing Laura Moon wants to do is bow to the whim of some bitch goddess with a knife to her neck. She wants to keep her eyes shut just to be contrary, to defy another of these immortal pricks.

That’s what she wants. But it’s not enough to override what she needs. And so she looks.

He’s standing. All six foot plus of him, and she wonders how it never registered that he was so ungodly (godly?) tall. Maybe it was that in his company she’d been undead, pissed, and able to flick him through windowpanes like a gnat.

_Or you just never had the chance to check the view from your knees._

That’s funny. As inappropriately and darkly funny as the circumstances of her death. She feels a laugh begging to escape, and only trailing her gaze up silences it. 

She can see the rip in his shirt where the wound went in. But in a field drenched in blood, where she can hear it drip off her into the grass, he is clean. Not a drop stains him, as if his clothes had been put through a wash, or it had been sucked away. Or within. 

She’s stalling and she knows it. She tells herself she can’t crane her neck up, there’s a knife there, but then the goddess oh so helpfully shifts the point. She tugs Laura’s head higher, and there they are. 

He’s still got bruises from the fight that killed him. His nose might be a little bent—she can’t tell if its different from before, and that bothers her immensely. His eyes might be different too—

“Let her go.”

She doesn’t look away when he says it, low and rough, brogue so deep the words are barely discernible. There _is_ something different in his eyes – it’s not her film of death, but it is a weight, a darkness she can’t specify. Laura finds that she’s terrified of it, with no idea why.

“I was just coachin’ the little huair in polite conversation,” the Morrigan says airily, drawing the flat of her knife up under Laura’s chin and along the planes of her cheeks. “She doesn’t take to it naturally. It’s the new parenting, I tell ya – spare the rod, raise you a cunt.”

“Careful – she doesn’t take well to the pet names,” Sweeney warns. 

“She’ll accommodate, I’m sure.”

Sweeney’s eyes are still on Laura, and the look he gives her is needling, a cock of his head and lift of the brow. Laura can translate perfectly.

When she whips her head back the crack of the Morrigan’s nose is most satisfying.

“Briseadh agus brú ar do chnámha!” the goddess swears as Laura clambers to her feet. “Ah—that’s my nose you gormless hussy—”

“Cheer up, Mor,” Sweeney says, tilting his head. That’s what it is, Laura realizes. He’s still in a way he wasn’t before, something settled in him, rooted. Like he came back from death with more than he left. “S’not like she could make you any less pretty.”

The Morrigan turns to glare at him from where she’s hunched over, cradling her bloody nose. Then her brow pops up, and she chortles. With a snap she sets it and leans her head back. “Ah, it’s fair play, Miss Moon,” she concedes, winking at Laura where she stands, a cautious foot away.

“I see you’re still clinging on like a bad hangover,” Sweeney snarks. He can still snark. Laura registers the fact, makes careful note.

“Yes, feminism has been most kind,” the Morrigan replies easily. “Witchcraft is in, and it’s all the rage to stick it to the patriarchy by calling on old Nemain. I’ve even been given a few death curses, for rapists, senators, the like.” She runs her tongue over her teeth. “Like warm mulled cider at a ceili.”

Sweeney just narrows his eyes, as if trying to piece together whatever makes up the new weight behind them..

“She’s a fine thing.” The Morrigan jerks her head at Laura. “Should have heard the battle-cry she gave me. The like I’ve not heard in centuries.” She cracks a grin that’s all teeth and bone. “Didja know she was a screamer when you picked her?”

“He didn’t pick anything,” Laura says, not sure why she needs to clarify so badly. She suspects this goddess long ago made an art of getting under people’s skin any way she could. “He killed me.”

“Must not have took,” the Morrigan snorts. “The pair of you. Exercises in half-assed resurrection, the both of you. Thank any god you like she called me in—”

“I didn’t call you!”

The Morrigan gives her a brows-high, head angled stare like Laura is a particularly truculent toddler. Sweeney speaks again, cutting through the wave of insistent violence Laura feels lapping at her heels. “What do you want, Battle-Crow?”

“That is the question of the night, isn’t it?” The goddess places her long-nailed hands on her waist. Her tight black pants are belted with a strap of leather embedded with claws. “What I what, what the little pox wants – and what you want. Wouldn’t it be nice if they all coincided?”

“They don’t,” Sweeney says flatly. “So you’d best be on your way.”

“The thanks I’m gettin’!” The Morrigan tosses her black hair. “You’d think I’d never done you a good turn.”

“It’s not your way,” Sweeney replies, and there’s that weight again. Laura has always thought of Sweeney as just a step away from human, too drunk and wry and punchable to rate with the other gods. The words _gravitas_ and _impressive_ weren’t ones she could apply to a frequently filthy drunk she’d almost castrated. But now— _I was a king, once,_ he had said. She might almost believe it.

“And what’s your way?” the goddess snaps. “Have you any? A thousand years wandering useless and mad, a hundred following doxies across the water for trinkets and cat-lap? A hundred more playing the wastrel, fucking humans and mermaids and whatever piss-poor excuse for a demi-god can fit between your legs, drinking yourself blind on swill, till you don’t remember your name? And then? To swear it to that one-eyed, two faced Viking sleeveen and follow him across the land playing lickarse? Doing work too dirty for Bolverkr himself?”

 _“_ Go hifreann leat a shlíomadóir lofa,” Sweeney seethes, shoulders curving for a fight, teeth bared. Again Laura sees that thing about him that is more, more than the foul-mouthed brawler or the sad-eyed drunk or even the somber man offering her furious glimpses at his debts and desires that she met too briefly in New Orleans.

From the Morrigan’s expression – vivid, rapt, hungry – she sees it too. “Bhí faillí á déanamh agat ar do dhualgais i leith do mhuintir, a rí mór,” she intones, the Irish rolling off her tongue and into the air between them.

“It’s none of your _fucking_ business if I have,” Sweeney roars, taking a step towards her.

“Oh, it most certainly _is_ ,” the Morrigan hisses. “And you and I and the little huair are going to do something about it.”

“Leave her out of it, and leave me alone,” Sweeney demands. The Morrigan tosses back her head and releases another cawing laugh. “Couldn’t if I willed it, and I don’t. She’s all wrapped up in this, thanks to you, and _you,_ my beloved shining lunk, are long past due on the debts you owe.”

“It’s not for _you_ to call ‘em in.”

“And yet here I stand,” the Morrigan declares, running a hand along her limber body. “And here _you_ stand, hale and hearty despite a spear through your chest. So you’ll start working off your indenture now, if you please.”

Sweeney huffs a laugh, one that Laura can recognize from Before. She wants to hold onto it, wants the Morrigan to leave her alone to she can confirm that this is still the Sweeney who annoys her so thoroughly and perfectly she was willing to drag him back from death’s greedy belly to keep at it. “Yours isn’t the power to lay oaths, Morrigan. My mind might be shite from today till Sunday, and worse for wear, but I haven’t forgotten that.”

“No indeed,” the bitch-goddess agrees. “Which is why it’s you who’ll be laying and keeping the oath to me.”

Sweeney outright guffaws at that. “A few centuries have turned you mad, Mor.”

The goddess doesn’t look mad to Laura. Her gaze is as focused and clear as a hawk on a snake. “You’ll swear to me.”

Sweeney blows out a mocking, incredulous breath. “Will I, yea?”

“You know,” the Morrigan says conversationally to Laura, as if they were two gal pals dishing over margaritas at brunch, “all Irishmen are essentially the same. Oh, they’ll bluster and blow about how they’re nothing like the next man, but in all, they have the same basic drives. Honor, of course – the desire to have their name immortalized in song, toasts to their bravery and nobility, and all such rot. Gold – wealth has never gone out of fashion. And oh, what’s the third one?” She paused, a performance of quizzical upon her ancient, deathly lovely face. “Oh, shite. Seems I’m stuck on the gold.”

One moment she’s standing a reasonably comfortable distance away, and the next her hand is rammed into Laura’s chest. There is a ringing in her ears and a tugging around her heart, like the Morrigan is rummaging for something and then –

Laura gasps. Now _that’s_ pain. She’s never had her heart squeezed, it’s not something she could survive if alive, or feel when dead. But _this_ \--this is an inverse of how it felt when she kissed Shadow, when she slew Argus. It’s like the goddess has a hand on her essence, and is smothering it, giving her a fresh taste of the darkness the jackel god promised her. Laura Moon is very, _very_ afraid.

“ _Saor í_.”

The words aren’t shouted, but they cause Laura and the Morrigan to turn. A week ago, Laura would have sworn she’d seen every permutation of anger the giant leprechaun was capable of—and been proudly been responsible for most. Well, it’s not the first time in her unlife she’s been wrong. He’s absolutely incandescent with rage now. It makes him taller, broader, the fury rolling off of him like heat from a furnace.

“What will you give me, son of Ethliu?” the Morrigan croons. “For the noxious pixie’s…” She looks Laura up and down. “Life?”

“This isn’t a fuckin’ negotiation.” Sweeney steps forward, and Laura can hear the thrum of it through the ground. “You’ll let her go.”

“Will I, yea?” The goddess echoes, and Laura can feel – genuinely, honest to the fucking gods _feel_ – the Morrigan run a gentle fingertip along the coin. She can’t hold back the cry of pain – high, whimpering, pathetic – and the vein in Sweeney’s neck bulges. She can tell, through the excruciating agony, that he’s fighting not to look at her.

“What will you give me?” the Morrigan presses, voice softer now, almost kind.

“I already swore my service to one vicious cunt and had to die to get out of the bargain,” Sweeney says, one hand fisted, the other reaching for something he expects to be there. “I’m not about to bend the knee to your carrion-fuckin’ arse.”

The Morrigan but raises a brow. “Oh no?” Her fingers tense, and Laura gasps, as if she needs air. She can feel the fingers around the coin, around her heart, can feel pain, or something very like it, like her essence is being tugged from her. Laura thinks she might be going, because there’s light now, leaking out of her chest, spilling out from behind Sweeney, as if he’s standing in front of the sun. Things that were black and white are starting to go black.

“Mallacht ort,” he rasps, and the desperation in it is like the tolling of a final bell. “Lig di dul.”

“Mionnaigh é,” the Morrigan says, and Laura can tell it’s a demand. “Leis an Sean-Mhionn.”

“Is leatsa mo sleá agus mo sciath. De réir mo shaol, mo stór, m’onóir, agus mo ghrá tugaim faoi deara é.”

“There, now.”

The Morrigan releases her, and Laura drops to her knees, gasping for breath as if her lungs could take air. She runs her hands over her chest, but there’s no hole, and the Morrigan’s hands are empty of gold and blood. She looks to Sweeney.

He’s standing rigid, like he’s about to attack but doesn’t have the means or the weapons. His eyes dart back and forth between nothing, as if sense and madness are warring behind them. Laura can tell something has been taken from him yet again, something he was so close to laying his hands on it still lingers. That shock of loss, like losing your footing and taking an unexpected dive into cold waters, is one she knows too fucking well. She feels the terror again, only now she can put a finger on it.

Death and resurrection changed her, and she still doesn’t know which side of the scale that evens out on. What did it do to him, to give his life in battle, and have it dragged back?

“Oh, take the puss off your face, Miss Moon,” the Morrigan breaks in. “We’re all three to be great friends now, like it or not. Best be getting used to yours truly.”

Laura turns slowly from Sweeney to meet the dancing eyes of the raven-haired immortal. The Morrigan cocks a brow. Laura raises one in return.

Her punch sends the bitch-goddess flying. The slap of the cocky god hitting mud isn’t enough to fix Laura’s mood, but it helps.

The Morrigan comes up sputtering, eyes narrowed on Laura, who calmly fishes in her dirty pocket for a cigarette. She doesn’t have a light, but it’s not really the point.

The Morrigan’s chuckle sounds watery through her split lip. “She’s a vicious little thing, isn’t she?”

“Lámh as.” Sweeney’s voice is hoarse, as if whatever he said to the Morrigan took as much out of him as shouting, but he’s speaking, and that’s something. “Nó sracfaidh mé do chroí amach. Oath or no oath.”

“Am I gonna have to buy a manual?” Laura demands. “Old Irish godspeak for the recently deceased?”

“Nah,” Sweeney says, finally tilting his head to look at her. His eyes are still dimmed, but they are seeing _her_. “Just assume I’m tellin’ her all the exciting places she can go stick her musty, diseased—"

“This will be _fun_.” The goddess pops to her feet, dusting off her boots. “I can’t wait to see what Bridey makes of you two when we get to New Orleans.”

Laura blinks, and looks to Sweeney for confirmation that her guess is wrong. It isn’t, and he realizes it at the same time, and they speak their thoughts aloud as one.

“ _Fuck_!”


	4. Teallach and Taste

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which our most unheroic heroes have automotive trouble, become even dearer friends, and stop for a taste of fine old-world cuisine.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whew, sorry for the delay! This chapter ended up being way longer than I expected. I hope y'all are still with me. Our dynamic duo is going to deal with all the issues of Sweeney's resurrection, why the Morrigan is here, and their whole thang-thang, don't worry. Familiar and unfamiliar faces coming your way as well. Comments are as mother's milk to a gal like me, so keep 'em comin' and thanks for reading!

**Teallach and Taste**

Laura had spent most of her life working as a dealer in a casino she eventually tried to rob, and most of her unlife punching her way through god-grunts, stealing cars, and running from police who objected to those activities. As she sits in the back of yet another stolen car, she feels slightly vindicated—clearly the answer to existential depression and the lure of bug spray really was a life of crime.

_Yeah — my heart would have shot that feather up like a bottle rocket._

She had insisted upon a light, and now sat smoking in the back of a stolen Toyota something, legs stretched out to fill the empty space. There was entirely too much of it, even with the shotgun seat pushed back as far as it would go to accommodate the giant playing backseat driver.

“Here – you’re headed northwest, ain’t no reason for north or west. New Orleans is south, you fecking harpy. Just turn and drive towards the ocean.”

“Lost your taste for the scenic, have you?” The Morrigan pauses in whistling a jaunty tune. “Well, you could amend that easily enough.”

“I ain’t takin’ your pilferin’ self through my horde, Battle-Crow.”

“Then shut your bitchin’ and sit back,” the war-goddess replies. “And take care what leaves your mouth concerning the Kindly Ones. None of us will like it if we meet up with my Mediterranean cousins. I once saw them intervene in a custody hearing for a father with a proclivity for home movies and his own.” She raises a brow at Laura through the rearview. “When I say the man was begging for the mercy of a prison shower and soap, I mean that in the most literal of senses.”

Sweeney tries to sit back and rams his oversized back against the insufficient seat. He does it once, trying to acclimate himself, shifting this way and that. He can’t, and rams himself into it again. Once, twice, then all at once like he’s trying to rip it out of the floor.

“Hey, hey, now!” The Morrigan protests. “You’ll break the car.”

“Fuck the car. Useless fuckin’ piece of shite seat—no leg room—fuckin’ Japanese don’t make anything that fits a man—”

“Men fit just fine,” the Morrigan snipes. “It’s you and your ridiculous overfed body takes up half the wagon.”

“Should have sat in the back,” Laura says, not wanting to agree with the bitch-goddess, but unable to help herself. “Clearly Toyota is operating on the outdated, marshmallow scale of leprechaun size.”

The Morrigan huffs a laugh. “Should have tossed him in the trunk.”

“No way I’m lettin’ you drive us to hell and back without my seein’,” Sweeney shoots back, his voice dipping lower. “You drag me into your whirlwind of fuckery, this time I’m goin’ in with both eyes open.”

Laura feels a pang of what might be guilt. For what? Bringing him back to life? Who wouldn’t want that?

_Because no matter how much you claim to want a war to die in, you’re too much of a coward to go and find your own._

Had he found his war? He’d spent thousands of years running from it, only to find it the moment she called him out. Had he found what he wanted at the end of Wednesday’s spear? It wasn’t as if she didn’t know the allure of an end when you didn’t see the point anymore. She finds herself trying to catch his eye and hates herself for it.

“You’re veerin’ where you don’t need to be veerin’,” Sweeney grouses at the Morrigan.

“You can take over any time, Long Spear – just open up that little rainbow in the sky.”

“Not a chance, ya bleedin’ hedgewitch.”

The Morrigan ignores him to cast her gaze into the mirror at Laura. “How are you back there, darling? Can’t believe you managed to put up with this one’s rawmaish without ripping out his windpipe.”

“Only ‘cause she was busy lookin’ to rip other things,” Sweeney muttered. The Morrigan looked delighted. “Oh ho! She steal your coin and decide to grab your crown jewels to match?”

The Morrigan looked ready to laugh her head off, and Sweeney was tapping his against the window, as if gearing up to punt his through it, so it was left to Laura to notice the—

“Man. Man in the road. Fucking stop!”

“Which side?” the Morrigan demanded.

“To the left,” Sweeney shouted.

“What? No, the right.”

“Damnu air!”

The car tilts, and Laura gives a scream of rage – not a-fucking- _gain –_ and they skid horribly. The truck lists to the right, then the left, before landing with a hard shudder. A second later it begins emitting a sinister hissing sound.

“Amach. Out, out, everyone out!

They scuttle out of the car, which sinks to the right, the front and back tires on the right side blown. Sweeney whirls on the man in the road, who now somehow stands comfortably off by the sign advertising _Il Cuore: Italian Cuisine,_ _1.2 miles_.

The man looks like his right hand tried to dress him while his left hand objected. His socks are mismatched, one a bright lurid yellow, the other purple with green spots. He has his red shirt half on, and only one leg in his pants. His grey hair is a wild mop exploding from his skull, and his face is hard and wrinkled. His eyes are a vivid blue, and he blinks, seeming utterly nonplussed by the six-foot-five tower of furious Irishman advancing upon him.

“What kind of split brain, _fuckin’_ idiot—”

“Shh!” The man hisses at Sweeney, coming forward with a finger to his lips, scuttling in his half-down pants like a crab abomination. “They’ll hear. All those lovely new telephone wires, they send out the messages, you know. Can’t stop them, can’t ignore them. Brain burrowers, Big and Tall.”

“Well, he’s insane,” Laura states flatly. The man turns to her, scrunching up his massive nose in something like affront. “You smell like dead endings and _mulch_ , little tramp. Bits and pieces all cobbled together by who-knows-who, and do _you_ give it a second thought? No, thank you very much. Walking around jingling and jangling, no sense, no _sense_ of any of it! Dank little bitch, with her bloody, dripping cunt—”

Laura’s been having a bad unlife, and a very annoying week. So she only feels mildly guilty when she stomps up to the old lunatic and jams her thumb into his spindly chest. He howls, doubling over, and she grabs the straggly hairs of his beard to force him to look up. “I am personally, thoroughly sick of the fascination everyone seems to have with my nether regions. If I could go just _one_ day without someone making a comment about my sex life, I would be oh-so-fucking grateful.”

Sweeney splits a grin, raising one brow at the whimpering man. “Could have warned you about this one. She doesn’t like when you point out the smell, or the state of her womanly bits.”

The old man glares at Sweeney. “You can’t judge me! Hanging around sniffing at rotting guts like a pig in shit, riffling for treasure, letting it all _happen_. Lazy, shiftless, carrot-top coward—”

Sweeney’s grin evaporates. He grabs the old man’s arm and hoists him up with a pop, his expression a level of vicious that would make a seasoned murderer quake. Laura has a new appreciation of just how _big_ Sweeney is, how capable of violence. “Want to see how many angles we can make your joints point?” He questions, his voice low and rolling like thunder over a cliff. “Or should I just let the manky one remove whatever’s left of your bollocks?”

The old man howls. “Nobody _listens_ anymore, nobody bothers. Nobody sees the bigger picture—nobody by me, spreading seeds and watching them come up rotten. Nobody but old—"

“Leave off, Long Spear,” the Morrigan interrupts. “There’s enough sense outside his head. We’ll get nothing of use from ‘im. Split him apart if you like but be quick about it. You two might fancy kipping out in a field, but I’ll take a nice warm hearth when I can get it.” She strides along down the side road, gesturing to the sign. “Let’s hope they’re friendlier than this one.”

“Don’t go,” whimpers the old man, crackling eyes darting between Sweeney and Laura as if they are suddenly his oldest friends. “It’s bad luck to dance through a door without knowing what’s on the other end.”

“Oh, don’t start makin’ sense now.” Sweeney quirks a brow at Laura. “You want to finish him? Defend your honor and all?”

He offers it lightly, half-mocking, but it is an offer. Laura is grateful for her death, for knowing that no tell-tale rushing of blood to and from her skin can reveal her emotions. “No shame, remember, Ginger Minge?” She lifts and drops a shoulder as if someone offering to let her disembowel a homeless man was a regular occurrence. “Nothing to defend.”

“Right. How could I forget.” Sweeney lifts the raving man up and chucks him behind without looking. From his yelp, it seems the man has landed in something prickly. Sweeney dusts off his hands. “Well, now that we both smell like somethin’ died—”

“Hurry up, back there!” the Morrigan hollers, tramping along down the road. “I need some proper food in me soon, lest I get testy.”

Laura snorts, but Sweeney shakes his head. “Sadly, she ain’t lyin’.”

“What, she gets worse?”

“Like all the hells your mother promised, and a kick in the balls to match.” Sweeney cracks his neck, sets his shoulders, and stomps off after the now whistling bitch-goddess. Laura feels obligated to follow.

If you had asked Laura Moon a week ago, she would have said getting Sweeney to shut up would be the best un-death day present you could give her. Tromping after a silent, revivified Sweeney should have been at least pleasant. It definitely shouldn’t have felt like something she’d grown used to was missing, like an arm (a feeling she could officially now lay claim to). And less than a week ago, Laura would have been perfectly comfortable filling the silence, nagging and pushing the redhead’s buttons until he snapped. There certainly should not have been a lump in her throat as she marched behind him, a weight that wasn’t the maggots in her guts.

She bumps into him when they stop up short, and the tips of her fingers tingle, like a touch of static electricity. She glances up at him, but he’s following the Morrigan’s gaze to the building across the road.

_Il Cuore,_ _Italian Restaurant,_ has clearly seen better decades. Constructed in a lodge style, with an open terrace, the E tilts dangerously downwards. Wisteria and climbing ivy have nearly claimed the whole of the right side. A deer nibbles at the remaining grapes growing from a dilapidated arbor on the left. It leaps away as they walk up the path.

The Morrigan tilts her head back and inhales deeply. “Gods above and below. Smell that, wouldja?” She slides her eyes open to stare at Laura. “Like everything that ever made your mouth water.”

Laura purses her dead lips. “I’ll take your word for it.”

The Morrigan forms her face into a facsimile of sympathy. “Oh, no. Don’t tell me death has robbed the things of this world of their flavor?”

“Anyone every tell you you’re a royal cunt, Battle-Crow?” Sweeney asks conversationally. The Morrigan glances briefly at him. “None who lasted to brag about it,” she replies, before shooting Laura a conspiratorial wink, and striding boldly up to the red door.

“Could you kill her?” Laura asks, braving a look at Sweeney. He rolls his shoulders like a mountain cat readying to pounce but answers, “Not without consequence.” He closes his eyes and lets out one long breath, as if steeling himself, and follows the Morrigan inside. Laura feels it best to do the same.

The restaurant door opens to reveal an interior as rustic as its exterior, the lodge within constructed of dark planks of wood and stone. The walls are painted in bright Roman-style murals of Italian country life. A gigantic brick oven takes up most of the left side, its fire crackling vigorously, making Laura worry about the effect of the heat on her decomposition. Five empty tables fill the main room, and to the left is a long, extravagantly stocked bar.

The only occupants are a man and three girls posted at the bar beneath a TV playing a soccer game between two countries that aren’t America, and a tall, stern woman who comes to meet them.

“A table for three?” Her voice is soft but rough, like it’s trying to rise up out of smoke-filled lungs. She had clearly been stunning when younger, but a near-permanent scowl has drawn sharp lines around her delicate mouth, and her hands are wrinkled and worn from use. Her dowdy apron covers most of her body, and her face is bare of makeup. A wisp of blonde hair escapes from her white headscarf, and she surveys Laura, Sweeney, and the Morrigan with proud, flashing hazel eyes.

“That would be lovely,” the Morrigan responds easily, as if their welcome had been warm. “By the hearth I think?”

Laura and Sweeney exchange a look and immediately head towards the bar.

They slide into stools side by side and eye the collection of wine, beer, rum, gin, vodka, liquor—

“They don’t skimp on it out here, do they?” Sweeney observes, his gaze ranging over their choices.

“It’s a mid-American necessity,” Laura says, looking between the absinthe and the amaretto. “Otherwise we’d all be lighting fireworks off in the back of our neighbors’ meth lab when we get home from our nine-to-five or setting fire to national parks just for a change of scenery.”

It’s an unfairly grim picture of a life she only half lived, but Laura isn’t feeling charitable. “Who does a girl have to squeeze here to get her cup filled?”

“You want the squeeze, cucciola,” says the man at the end of the bar, in a musical voice with an accent like Central Casting’s idea of a Mafiosi. “I can fill your glass till it overflows. Just tell me what flavor you want.”

Laura swivels in her stool to take him in. He has the body of a 1970s glam rocker who let himself go. His olive skin is flushed red, a face that was clearly handsome in his youth now worn, glassy eyes marred by the dark circles of a more-than-habitual user. His hair – long, black, and reeking of product – falls from a receding hairline. His royal purple shirt is open, displaying chest hair and an overabundance of gold bling. The women around him look no older than early twenties. They look like the cheap, corn-fed brand of starlets, and hover around him like groupies. The blonde on his left is playing with one of his chains, while the brunette on his right sits practically in his lap as she strokes his curls. The tallest, a black-haired beauty with deer-in-headlights eyes stands behind him, giving him a massage. They all are clearly high.

Laura shakes her head. “I’m trying to decide if that was the worst line I’ve ever heard, and I worked at a casino.”

“And were any of those men lucky enough to take you home, belissima?”

Sweeney snorts, and Laura turns to scowl at him. He’s in the process of reaching one of his obscenely long arms over the bar to grab a bottle of Bushmills. “Oh, any man in the vicinity of this one is in danger of getting himself lucky.”

The man in purple tilts his head, and blinks at Laura through lashes she will admit she’s envious of. “Is that true? Are you the kind of girl who likes to get wild?”

Sweeney chuckles again, and Laura elbows him, knocking over the bottle of whiskey. While he swears in Irish, Laura keeps her gaze on the man in purple. “You couldn’t handle me if I did, Jersey Shore.”

The man blinks those fabulous lashes, and then smiles, flashing teeth in desperate need of a dentist. “But I would love to try. And you would love it—or you would learn to.” His pupils are blown wide, almost fully black, and its like looking into the dark space at the beginning of the woods, the shadows past the last flashlight. His girls giggle, and Laura scowls. “Girls, I don’t care what band he played for in his glory days, there’s no way a the music is worth this.”

All three girls’ jerk their heads up to glare at Laura so fast she actually starts.

“Of course, it is,” snaps the tallest one, the glaze in her eyes now replaced by manic fury. “You just can’t hear it.”

“Fuck,” Sweeney rumbles behind her, and she can feel the vibration from his chest against her back. “We’re gonna hafta be properly shitfaced to deal with this crew, and we’re already down one bottle of Bushmills, thanks to you.”

“You had better be able to pay for that.” The woman in the apron comes striding up to the bar, looking at the puddle of liquor.

“Um, we will,” Laura promises awkwardly, not sure if she’s lying. “We’ll clean it up.”

“No, no, no. It’s for me to do it, you are the guests.” The woman sighs the sigh of the long-suffering and pulls a rag out of one of her apron pockets to wipe at the counter. “He’s bothering you, yes?” She gestures to the man at the end of the bar, and before either has a chance to answer shouts, “You! Stop bothering the guests!’

“Bother? Why you say bother?” He holds up both hands with a comically exaggerated expression of innocence, which makes his groupies giggle again. “We’re all of us making friends. Why do you have to be so strict, zia, zia, mi zia agonizzante?”

“Because otherwise you give away all my booze and destroy my place. Tu e le tue troie.”

“Ah! Zia! Zia Focolare.” He makes a big show of covering the ears of the girl playing with his curls, who just giggles, yet again. “Shh – don’t worry, she didn’t mean it.”

“I did and I do.” The woman rolls her eyes at Laura. “Years of this. My whole life here. He is supposed to be bartender, but he tends nothing but his pisello.”

“Ah!” the man lifts his finger at that. “Listen. It’s true. God once told me I could either have a big pisello, or a good memory.” He frowns. “I just can’t remember what I chose.” He pauses for a beat, as if waiting for Sweeney or Laura to join in, and then laughs, his girls falling in on cue.

“Which drugs is he on?” Laura asks the woman, who is now cleaning the rest of the bar. The man hears and quirks his head up at Laura, as if unable to decide if she’s being serious. Then, in the painfully sudden manner of a chronic drunk, he bursts into raucous laughter. “Which? Oh, ho, oh ho heh—which. What a gas!”

“There’s your answer,” Zia says in disgust, shaking out her rag in his direction. “Utterly no self control. Cacchio.”

“Non siamo tutti frigi,” he mutters, waggling his brows at one of the girls. Zia immediately reaches into another pocket in her apron for a spoon, which she lobs at the other man with admirable aim. It strikes him dead in the forehead. “Porca puttana, woman, why?”

Zia draws herself upright in red-faced fury and lets out a long hiss, like steam from a tea kettle. “Watch your mouth in my place, barbaro! Ti sei rincoglionito?”

“Eh! Non devi essere un tale rompipalle,” he fires back.

“Sei un coglione!”

Laura is seriously regretting her decision to bunk ninth grade Spanish. She looks behind at Sweeney, and finds he’s managed to procure himself another bottle which he is downing at an alarming rate. “Could you not?”

Sweeney angles his gaze down at her and finishes the bottle slowly, in giant, provocative gulps, before deigning to answer. “No way I’m stayin’ sober for this rodeo, Dead Wife. I’d recommend you a bottle, but we both know it’ll just slide right through ya.”

“Cos'è quello?” The man stops his swearing match with Zia, holding up a hand as he looks back to Laura. “Don’t be a’ ridiculous. Everyone can find something to taste here in my collection.” He pops up, patting the bottom of the girl who slides from his lap, pouting, and walks over behind the bar. “Hmm, something for the lady, the lady,” he murmurs to himself, eyeing the myriad wares. He glances over his shoulder at Laura, with a look that is suddenly much too clear-eyed. “I think…yes!”

He turns around bearing his selection reverently, a bottle of a deep red. “Uh, yeah,” Laura says as he motions one of his girls to bring a glass, “not really a wine girl—”

He makes shushing noises as he pours. “No, non, just a taste. A sip.” He holds the glass out to her. “I promise, it’s for you.”

Laura looks to Sweeney, who is leaning against the bar, coat half-falling off his massive shoulders. He shrugs, raising his bottle, which must be new, as it is full again. “When in Rome.”

Laura clinks her glass with his and makes herself not watch him drink. The wine touches her lips, and it’s viscous and cool, slipping past them like a sly lover. It feels warm and goes down easy, and it tastes – it _tastes_ —

“It’s good!”

The man’s plump lips spread into a satisfied, knowing smile as Laura keeps going, “It takes like sangria in the morning, but kind of like tequila shots I used to do in a bar near my cousin’s—and strawberries, it tastes like fucking strawberries, the small kinds, the ones that grow wild and are actually fresh.”

“Of course,” he says smoothly, his accent a perfect seduction, “we only grow wild things here. Only wild things can be sweet to the taste when they are harvested. You should know that, Laura Moon.”

Laura blinks, and sways. She looks down at her glass, which is half empty. She blinks, and it’s full again. She looks up at the man watching her with midnight eyes.

“You. You’re a god.”

Zia snorts, still wiping the bar. The firelight shows every crag in the woman’s face. “Nice of you to finally notice.”

“Oh.” Laura blinks. “Right. Then this is—”

“A trap, yes,” the man says, tilting his head and letting his curls fall along his neck. “Sorry, bambola.” The TV behind the bar stops playing the soccer game, fizzing with white noise, and then emits a high-pitched, feminine laugh. He has the nerve to look genuinely regretful. “But there’s not so much room in the world anymore for wild things.”

Laura braces her hands on the bar and pivots. She doesn’t remember the last time she was drunk – it shouldn’t be possible now – and it should make her angry, but she still feels warm and flush and like she’s eaten strawberries. She looks to the door and sees the crazed man from the road standing just in front of the threshold. She _knows_ she’s drunk, because his head splits in two, one smiling, one not. She tears her gaze away, eyes stinging, and moves to face Sweeney.

He’s still leaning against the bar, stiller than she’s ever seen him, and for a moment she’s terrified – she’s drunk, she’s dreaming, he’s dead, she’s dead, he’s got blue paint on his face and the edges of his jacket are on fire – and then he blinks. “Hmm.”

He looks from her, to the two gods besides them, and back to his third bottle. He tilts his head, frowns slightly, and shrugs. Lifting the bottle back to his lips, he gulps it down languidly, and Laura is stuck watching the amber liquid disappear into his mouth, his Adam’s apple rising and falling rhythmically. He releases the empty bottle with a satisfied gasp and a burp, pounding twice on his chest. “Well.” He stands upright, wavering slightly. He spins the bottle delicately between two fingers, and then smashes it against the bar. He lifts the broken end, something wild in his eyes. “Best be getting’ to it, then.”


	5. Ignis and Ignorance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which an argument becomes rather vigorous

**Ignis and Ignorance**

Laura has been in her share of weird bar fights now. She can say, with 89% certitude, that this is the weirdest this week.

Sweeney had lobbed the broken bottle at the god in purple, only to have it batted away by the tall groupie. She’d leapt up on the bar like a wildcat and launched herself at him, nails out like claws. She must have been strong, or whatever they’d drugged him with was capable of weakening a man who regularly pounds down enough alcohol to sterilize a high school gym, because Sweeney stumbled. Now on top, the groupie is going to town on him, slashing at him with her nails and growling and yipping like an animal.

Laura strides over to rip the other woman off – or she intends to. It comes out more of a wobble, and she’s hit from the side by the smaller blonde girl, knocking her off course. Laura throws out a jab that should rip the other woman in part, but it goes wide. Instead she’s met with a backhand that makes her see pretty, pretty lights.

“Shit.” She fights to get her footing as the second groupie hops down to join the first. They waver back and forth in her sight, spots dotting their arms. “Whatever he’s pumping you with, girls,” she snarks as she tries to get her vision to stop seeing double, “You’re not gonna have that spring in your step when you’re hurling your guts back up.”

“Your guts can’t even stay inside you, vrykolas,” the blonde mocks, as she and her compatriot advance. “We know the taste of bliss from the lips of the Liberator himself. We’ll still be singing his hymns when you’re back to ash and bone.”

Laura definitely has a feisty comeback on her cold lips but winds up swallowing it when they rush her. They’re strong in a way no human woman should be, touched by a god’s power. Laura can relate.

Doesn’t mean she’ll go easy on them.

She gets one hand free and slams her fist into the blonde one’s jaw. She’s rewarded with a satisfying crack, mitigated by the slash that burns across her cheek. The wild woman’s nails are longer than they have any right to be, and another swipe cuts dangerously close to her unbeating heart. Laura jerks back and then slams her forehead into the groupie, bringing her boot down on a bare foot. The spazzing woman spits in her face but stumbles away. Laura grabs the blonde by her luscious, salon-commercial lochs, and yanks. The smaller woman goes flying into the tall groupie atop Sweeney, knocking him free.

“That’s a girl,” he applauds, rolling to his feet. He zeroes in on the man in purple, laying one hand on the bar and vaulting himself over it. Immediately the remaining groupie abandons fighting Laura to protect her man. She scrambles over the bar, hissing and scratching at the Irishman.

“Fuck’s sake.” Sweeney slams his full weight into the liquor shelves, and bottle after bottle comes cascading down, burying the woman. The god in purple lets out an almost feminine shriek. “Sei proprio uno stronzo!”

“Aye, probably,” Sweeney says, and slams an elbow into one of the remaining shelves just to prove it. He grabs a bottle of The Gael before it falls, gulping it down with a provocative waggle of his red brows.

“Patetico mezzo dio.” The god in purple raises his arms and Laura feels something in the house tilt, the air going redolent with the scent of overripe grapes. Vines that had drooped decoratively from the ceiling now descended in force, tangling around Sweeney’s arms. He swears and rips at them, backing out of the bar as the god follows.

“Chi cazzo credi di essere?” he demands.

“Not a goddamn Chia pet, that’s what.” Sweeney swats at a menacing growth of ivy. “Get the DDT, DeadWife. We have us here a gardener.”

Laura tries to take a step and finds she cannot move. Ivy has wrapped around her ankles and are now rising up her calves. Thorns prick her cold skin, puncturing sutures, threatening to unravel her. She desperately rips at them, swearing up a blue streak as they force her to cut her own hands.

The vines reach Sweeney’s ankles, entangling them. He trips, all six foot five of him slamming into the ground with the force of a redwood. The god in purple advances on him now, eyes gleaming violet fire. “Sciocco a combattere con me, Lonnbéimnech,” he murmurs, mellifluous voice dripping venom, “quando tutta la follia è mia da dare.”

Sweeney is in the midst of ripping off a particularly tenacious bit of vine determined to wrap around his waist when his face goes slack. There is a direct line of sight between his eyes and the purple god’s, and whatever he is seeing pulls the fight right out of him. He sits like a doll as the vines creep around him.

“An gcloiseann tú na cloig?” the purple god whispers in Irish. A whimper makes its way past Sweeney’s lips. He makes a movement with his head like he’s trying to turn away, but a vine around his neck forces him to keep staring into those violet pits. “Conas a ghlaonn siad.”

The low moan that he makes is one of the worst sounds Laura has ever heard. It sounds like decades worth of pain, centuries of suppressed agony. It sounds like madness in a bottle, schizophrenia on tap, the budding, blossoming mania that gives way to the rock-bottom certainty of depression. Laura can feel it infecting her, as a laugh she doesn’t want presses past her lips. It is echoed by a ripple of godly amusement to her left.

Zia stands off to the side, outlined by the hearth, arms folded as she watches them lose. Laura’s senses aren’t her own, but she doesn’t think she mistakes the way the flames cling to Zia, caressing the older woman’s sharp frame and self-satisfied smile.

It’s that – the ripe spectacle of more godly arrogance – that pushes Laura that little bit over the edge. With a hiss she rips off the vines that bind her, ignoring the way they peel at her graying skin. She swats the crawling ivy aside as she barrels determinedly at Zia, yanking out a handful of climbing roses that were sprouting blood-red blossoms and vicious thorns in real time.

The woman turns the full force of her gaze on Laura as she draws level with her, and it burns. Laura had stared up at the sun once during an eclipse (of course she had) and this is to that as a tsunami is to a wavepool. Zia wavers at the edges, radiating heat. “You will not last, little Laura,” the goddess intones. “The earth takes back all she births.”

“And yet here I am, still kicking.” Laura steels herself against the heat and wraps her left arm around the goddess’ neck. With her other, she angles the outsized thorns at Zia’s heart.

The goddess’ breath hitches slightly, but her voice is cool, even as Laura burns. “What do you want, dead girl?”

“Let him go.”

Zia barks a laugh. “Bromios. The girl contests.”

The purple god spares at glance to his left, and then whips around to face Laura and Zia. Sweeney sways and falls onto all fours, as Bromios flushes, the veins in his neck red and mauve. “Ma che cazzo fai, puttana?”“

“Missed my college trip to Europe, Punch Drunk. If you wanna call me some variation of bitch, you should do it in English.”

“Child,” Zia hisses. “Foolish, selfish, sightless human. You know not what you do.”

“Yep, that’s me,” Laura replies, giving a small smile even as she feels her undead skin begin to peel under the relentless heat. “But I’m pretty sure I’ll fuckin’ enjoy this.”

Laura cocks back her hand to drive the thorns into the goddess’ heart. The temperature drops, and a voice like a thunderclap booms, “Stop!”

The Morrigan is suddenly in her line of vision to the right. Smoke seems to cling to her, and she’s not dressed in black leather but bare, save for curling designs in blue woad. Feathers are tied into her wild hair, as blood drips from her hands. “Laura. Let her go.”

“Fuck that.” Sweeney spits and wrestles against the vines still trying to bind him to the floor. “Drive it through her rotten chest.”

“Do that,” the Morrigan counters, voice echoing like a general’s across a killing field, “and I will consider it a breach of bargain.” Her black eyes narrow. “He’ll pay the price for it.”

Laura grips the mutant rose thorns until they threaten to dice off her fingers. “Fuck!” She keeps her gaze on the Morrigan as she throws them aside, and then as she punchs Zia hard across the face. It may have actually melted some of the skin off her knuckles; Laura refuses to look to check.

The Morrigan just turns bemusedly to look at the goddess now doubled over and clutching her cheek. “I expect certain of your incestuous, ridiculous brethren to surrender to the New Gods, Vesta, but I had hoped of better for you.”

Zia looks up, and the rage wipes away the lines and wrinkles, leaving a face so stunning in its harshness and beauty that Laura’s eyes water. “Better?” Her laughter is ageless and high and unforgiving. “In a land where hospitality means nothing? Where virtue and chastity are mocked, where people no longer gather as a family but abandon their parents as soon as they can drive a car and smoke a bong, and no one cares to keep a promise? What better could I have here?”

“Surely the new order didn’t promise you a return to old-fashioned values and virgins?” the Morrigan says caustically. “Oh, Hes’ – tell me you didn’t fall for the same bullshit as a Florida senior voter?”

The other goddess pulls herself upright, eyes burning like the very heart of fire. “You couldn’t even _sense_ us!” Vesta’s voice rings through the restaurant, causing all the plates to shiver. “These two fools didn’t even _guess_ we were gods.”

“To be fair,” the Morrigan says, “they are both recently resurrected. There’s a good chance half their brains were left in the ground.”

Vesta harrumphs. “Gaia defend me. I already have to deal with this one—” She gestures to the purple god, who draws himself up to full height. “And you come in with another morto di figa who destroys my place.”

“I’ll have him pay for the damages,” the battle-goddess promises.

Sweeney snorts. “The fuck I will,” he swears, still caught in mortal combat with a particularly determined curl of ivy. “Ain’t payin’ one copper for this wino’s tainted drink.”

“You aren’t worthy to sample the least of my wares,” the wine god spits at Sweeney. “Vattelo a pigliare in culo.”

“Up yours, ya gobshite.”

“Segaiolo.”

“Cunt.”

“Language!” Zia shrieks, and the hearth blazes hot enough to make everyone shut up. She fixes her fabulous eyes, icy cold despite the sweltering air radiating from her, on the Morrigan. “What do you want, Nightmare Queen?”

“To remove the scales from your eyes.” The Morrigan steps forward, apparently unbothered by the raging heat. “You think you’re siding with the new gods against the old, buying yourselves a new life by playing their lackeys. These two—” She jerked her head at Laura and Sweeney “—think they’re gonna take down the leader of the old gods faction, for all sorts of personal, petty reasons.” She shakes her head at Sweeney’s look of fury as he opens his mouth and raises her voice. “You’re both wrong. You fight each other as they laugh, dolls in their hands.”

“Cut the cryptic, Battle-Crow,” Sweeney snaps, and Bromius actually nods in agreement, “I find I must agree with the testa di cazzo,” he says. “Speak plainly, corpse witch.”

“There are no New Gods versus Old Gods,” she announces. “The two are one – and you are all set for sacrifice.”


	6. Rivelazioni and Rivalry

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which a meal is finally had, the state of popular music is mourned, the Morrigan finally reveals her hand, and Laura is offered new options

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I want to severely thank jandjsalmon for their comments, it's what's keeping me going. I promise things will get sexy soon -- it's a' comin'

**Rivelazioni and Rivalry**

“As much as I adore a good MAD scenario and all it’s nuclear potential,” the Morrigan poses lightly, “perhaps we could continue this discussion in a way that’s more peaceable? Less Mexican standoff?”

Laura eyes Bromius, who eyes Sweeney and Laura, who eyes Zia, who finally rolls her eyes. “Very well,” she relents, tampering down her power so that Laura is no longer melting at her fingertips. “It’s hardly the first time I’ve had to be the peacekeeper. Bromius—lascia stare.”

“You can’t possibly be thinking of trusting them?” Bromius snaps. “Zia, mi zia—”

“Yes, I am, and I have been around battles long before you wandered down from the mountains with your lions and wild troia,” she castigates, and Laura backs away as the hearth flares up again. “I have seen backstabbing and shifting alliances and the agony of gods caught in the crossfire—if there is a way to be smart about this, I will take it, and if you can’t behave, you can wait outside with Janus.”

Bromius makes a pout that hints at the handsome man he used to be, and then snaps his fingers. The vines around Sweeney retreat. Sweeney shoot to his feet and proceeds to kick and stomp on them while swearing in Gaelic. Zia eyes the rivulets of alcohol flooding the overgrown floor. “Perhaps by the hearth?”

The four gods and four humans make their way to the longest table by the oven. Laura sits by Sweeney, who determinedly shuffles his chair as far as possible away from the Morrigan. Bromius and his girls settle across from them as Zia sets out cheese, olives, bread, and hummus. Once everyone has a plate, and a sparkling carafe of water sits at the center, Zia sinks into a chair between the two factions. “Alright, Morrigan. You sit at my table. Speak what you will.”

“And a fine table it is,” she compliments. “I take it you were approached by the so-called New Gods?”

“She wasn’t,” the purple god says, leaning back into the massaging hands of the tall groupie, who is glaring at Laura. “ _I_ was. Back in the sixties, Media and I had a tete-a-tete over the blossoming San Francisco scene. Fruit of the vine exchanged for fruit of the flower children and their little blotted papers, tambourines for electric guitars, ecstasy for—well, ecstasy. And you all saw how that went – music as revelation, a generation on fire, singers as stars and stars as new idols. _I_ brought Bill Graham the Airplane – and he still owes me money, that shmuck. We changed the sound of American culture in those years. We opened the doors for The Doors.”

“Yes, yes.” Zia rolls her eyes. “And what did you do? It wasn’t enough, just like it’s never enough. You decided to shove that white stupafacente up your nose, and shoot that spazzatura, and then—”

“It was the pigs, i maiali, and the damn FBI!” he defended. “Trying to destroy what we were creating.”

“You weren’t singing that tune when you brought Dennis Wilson and that mad Welsh troia to my house with a crateload of the powder,” Zia gripes. “Or when your mad mignotte decided that they wanted those awful men on motorcycles for boyfriends. You saw how well _that_ ended!”

“Burned like a red coal carpet,” Bromius muses, an idyllic smile on his face. “Ah, the power of music. Those were the days.”

“And then they ended,” the Morrigan says, drawing him back from his reverie. “Music gets commodified, all catchy choruses and pre-programmed drumbeats, no more room for wild artistry that might alienate the mainstream middle. But then New Media reached back out, didn’t she? What did she promise you—an Autotuned Dylan?”

“Pfft,” Bromius scoffs. “Think I cannot grow with the times? The rave scene and dubstep – those kids will be mine when the dust settles.”

“And you?” the Morrigan questions Zia. “The firstborn of Rhea, the owner of the fire that lights the way home—what did they offer you? A franchise? A string of Olive Gardens with real Italian food?”

Zia raises the edge of the lips in a barely-there smile. “I suppose you believe the old gods can offer me better?”

“Perhaps—depends on how inventive the Shifty-Eyed one feels like being.” The Morrigan shrugs. “It doesn’t actually matter to him or that schizophrenic abomination which side you choose. Your death serves both—no matter what side of the killing field you fall on.”

Bromius frowns, and Laura feels herself mirroring him. She looks to Sweeney—he watches the Morrigan with eyes at half squint, anticipatory and hungry. Zia tilts her head. “You would have me believe Odin does not care who wins this war he so wants?”

“Oh, he will win,” the Morrigan assures, “for there is no way he can lose. Odin is lord of conflict. All conflict serves him.”

“And Mr. World?” Laura demands, trying to make sense of what the Morrigan is implying. “Why would he work with Wednesday? What does he get if New Gods die along with the Old ones?”

The Morrigan barks her laugh. “The Lie-Smith revels in such chaos – and has for thousands of years,” she explains, with all the panache of a magician revealing another’s prestige. “Those two are brothers beneath the skin—and they’ve set into play their own personal Ragnarok.”

“Li mortacci tua,” Bromius swears, slamming both hands on the table. His irises flash purple again, lips practically frothing. “That bastard—how could I have not known? That horsefucker holds nothing sacred.”

“Okay, hold up.” Laura tries not to laugh. “You’re saying that Mr. World is actually—”

“Loki, Laufey’s son,” Zia says, not at all laughing. “The liar, the trickster. The one who delights in mischief, the sly thief.” Her lips twitch. “Contriver of Baldr’s death.”

“How do you know this?” Laura insists. “Did he tell you?”

“He didn’t have to—it’s self-evident to one such as myself,” the Morrigan preens. “In any battle, a true battle god always wins…no matter what side they started on. Once the bloodlust flows, we dine.”

“Fuckin’ one-eyed cunt’s been plain’ both sides.” Sweeney’s voice is low and hard, lips quirking up in a smile of fury and vindication.

“Dining on dead gods right and left.” Morrigan chuckles at Laura’s expression. “Well, don’t get too bent over it. Takes a true battle god to see it, and he and I are alike enough to understand each other’s ways.”

Sweeney huffs. “No wonder I always feel like introducin’ you to your insides.”

“Don’t be grim,” the Morrigan chides. “The same thing kept you from seeing it is what made it so impossible to follow his orders. You’re no true battle-god.”

Sweeney stands upright at that, so offended it’s almost comical. “The fuck I ain’t.”

The Morrigan shakes her head, ignoring his incandescent fury. “That wasn’t an insult, you giant walking cider press. Odin could order the death of a girl to propel his knight with nary a second thought – indeed, with amusement, if I know him well enough, which I do. It was a clever play,” she muses, and Laura feels sick at the admiration in her eyes. “But,” the Morrigan resumes, “he should have chosen a different man to carry it out. He forgot who you were just as surely as you did. Never expected you to have such a conniption of conscience about it.”

“Didn’t stop him doing it.” The words are past Laura’s lips before she can think to stop them, and the cohort of gods pause. Laura does her best to not look right and catch Sweeney’s expression. Is she really still angry about this? After everything?

_Yes_ , she realizes, and what’s more, she’s _more_ angry now. It makes no sense, of course – he didn’t know her then, she was just some human mark to him, some floozy cheating on her man –a pawn to be knocked down. That should make it easier to take, and yet somehow, at some point, that made it all the worse.

The Morrigan leans in, braided hair falling to the sides of her head, and Laura can hear drums and the clash of steel. “And it cost him more than you could ever know. He’ll be paying the price for that betrayal long after you’re dust again. The honor of a king dies hard, Laura Moon.”

Laura won’t look at Sweeney, though she can feel the weight of his eyes. So she says the first thing that comes to her mouth, yet again. “Not Moon. Not anymore. It’s Laura—”

“We stay here any fuckin’ longer it’ll be like we’re askin’ Grimnir to take another bite of us,” Sweeney interrupts. “So the one-eyed fuck is double-crossin’ everyone but himself – color me surprised. More reason not to be sittin’ here waitin’ for him.”

“If a body didn’t know you better,” the Morrigan says casually, “they might call that a bit cowardly.”

Sweeney goes preternaturally still. The promise of violence thrums in the air, and Laura feels a thrill run up her spine. There is something in her liquifying guts that twinges like guilt. Bromius leans forward, his groupies sporting hungry grins. Laura finds herself waiting for it as well, so when Sweeney huffs and walks off, she feels cheated. She’s on her feet and across the room before she’s consciously decided upon it.

“Hey!”

His back stiffens, but he doesn’t turn. “Where are you going?” she demands.

“Drink.”

“Seriously? What, you want more of whatever turned you into a gibbering idiot?”

He whirls at that, eyes snapping with anger, and Laura relaxes. “Of course – once again I save you from screwin’ yourself six ways to Sunday, and this is the gratitude I get.”

“Saved _me_ —"

“You were about to hand yourself over to the Morrigan on a golden fuckin’ platter,” he hisses, coming in close and dropping his voice. Laura stands her ground. She certainly doesn’t lean up into him. “Don’t tell her your actual fuckin’ name, you nit,” he instructs. “First rule of dealin’ with any fair folk – don’t tell ‘em your name. Or eat their food—”

“Or braid their hair or suck their cock. I got it, Ginger Minge.”

“You sure?” he snipes back. “Seems to me you’d have trouble with at least one, considerin’ how you went out. I was there, remember? You made a holy show of yourself, Dead Wife.”

“Holy show? What is this, you get around her and suddenly your English is Irish-er?” Laura has dropped her voice down to meet his level, and now they’re both whispering. “Who is she?”

“Battle goddess, just like she said. A crow to Grimnir’s raven, and just as much of a two-faced scavenger.” Sweeney pauses as if struggling and then relenting and adds, “And a bit of witchery and sovereignty tossed in. Thinks of herself as a guardian of Ireland. A gatekeeper of sorts.”

“No.” Laura crosses her arms over her chest. “No, I mean – who is she to you?”

Sweeney blinks, and then a hint of the roguish enters his voice as he purrs, “Why? Feelin’ the bite of the green-eyed are ya, DeadWife?”

It takes Laura a second to parse through his meaning. “Jealous?” She scoffs, but there’s some effort behind it. “Could your ego get any bigger?”

Sweeney’s brow raises and his smile widens, but Laura is saved by the arrival of Bromius and his groupies. “My Zia thinks maybe we don’t kill you.” He shrugs, a magnificent gesture. “My girls, they are less convinced.”

“But we could be persuaded,” croons the blonde one, running her gaze up and down Sweeney’s immense height lasciviously. Laura snorts. “Right. Because no man can resist being made into sashimi by a girl coked out of her brain.”

“Obviously, you’ve never been to LA,” Bromius sniffs, and then frowns. “Where are you from, corpse goddess?”

“ _Not_ a god,” Laura asserts. The tallest groupie leans forward and inhales, causing Laura to jerk back in offense. “The fuck—”

“Mente,” she declares, to the nods of the others.

“O è semplicemente cieca?” Bromius muses. “Either way – I can see why Odin wanted you killed.”

Laura stiffens. “Gee thanks – I can see why he didn’t bother to kill you.”

The groupies stop their dazed swaying, turning towards her as one, like the heads of a hydra. The purple god captures Laura’s gaze. “I _have_ died,” he says, his musical voice lilting like her favorite song, bubbling up inside her like the first time she puffed a joint. “I have been rent to pieces by those who would silence me, butchered like a pig because I made women fight and men dance. I am reborn from my many mothers, risen as the fruit of the vine. I am every line you dare not cross until you do, the gentleness in the male, ferocity in the female, and everything in between. Dionysus may no longer have his temples, Bacchus his empire, but I have always thrived in the wild spaces where people flee when civilization becomes too much to bear. I wonder, arisen-girl-who-is-not-a-god, what form your breaking will take? How will your madness taste, to ómorfo ptóma mou? Tha eínai i anástasí sas pio glykiá apó ton thánató sas?”

Laura is swaying, her hips moved by a phantom beat. She wants to throw back her head and howl, but she doesn’t want to break contact with those eyes that flame violet, that promise decadence and freedom without restriction or absolution.

“Let her alone, you fuckin’ wino.”

His voice cuts through her daze, and his hand on her shoulder breaks it. Sweeney is glaring ten kinds of murder at Bromius, but the old god merely chuckles. “Mi hai rotto I coglioni,” he clucks. “Come ladies. These two don’t want to play with us.”

There is enough of an emphasis on the last word that Laura pulls away from Sweeney (once the blonde groupie has stopped batting her lashes at him over her shoulder). “Don’t worry,” he grouses, putting up his hand. “I don’t expect any thank yous this century.”

“Since when did your standards become so low?” The Morrigan’s mocking voice makes Laura put another step between herself and Sweeney. The battle-goddess is swaggering, hand parked cockily on her right hip, where a Bowie knife kisses her thigh. “I suppose this American economy does make us all scale down eventually.”

Laura blinks. “I’m sorry. Was that a height joke? And at my expense or his?”

“The pair of you, really,” the Morrigan concedes easily. “And you do make a rare pair.”

“Right. I’m off to get properly banjaxed,” Sweeney says, tipping his hat and throwing them both the finger. Before Laura can walk after him, the Morrigan is in her face. “Having a pleasant time, darling?”

“What the fuck is your angle?” Laura demands. The Morrigan gives her a wide-eyed double blink. “I thought I’d made that clear. The Allfather and his slimy compatriot want us at each other’s throats—I’m here to build bridges.”

“Bullshit. You dipped out on us and waited until I almost gutted Zia to step in,” Laura counters. “What makes you any different from Wednesday?”

“I told you – I’m not so very different,” the Morrigan admits freely. “And that’s all to the good—otherwise I wouldn’t be wise to the trick, and here to help you.”

“Help us?” Laura grins, angry. “I might not be a thousand years old, but I’m twenty-seven alive and dead. You can’t convince me you give a fuck about Sweeney.”

“Ah,” the Morrigan exhales, “but _you_ do.”

It’s so blatantly, plainly said that Laura’s hands jerk involuntarily. She wants to put them around the Morrigan’s neck and squeeze. The battle goddess smiles; she knows it. “Oh. You’re a menace, Indiana.”

Laura swallows even though her mouth no longer makes phlegm. “Yeah, I am. So I’d back up if I were you, Hot Topic. I can feel myself getting maggot-mouth again, and I know what works to push that off.”

The Morrigan actually chuckles. “And you think _killing_ a god is the only way to go about it?” An eyebrow arches. “Mm?”

Laura does _not_ turn her head towards the bar. “If you know something relevant about reanimated corpse maintenance—”

“You know exactly what you need to keep that bag of bones warm and flush,” the Morrigan cuts in brutally. “You just want someone else to say it first, so you don’t have to admit it to yourself. A god’s token bought you this half-life – only godly blood or godly…hmm…” She smiles to show her canines. “Let’s say, _touch_ – can buy you more. Either way you square it, Ms… _Moon_ —things will be messy. I don’t care which path you choose – I myself am equally as partial to the martial F as the other. But enough of this nonsense about how you’ll keep your distance or be so different.” She clucks her tongue, shaking her head. “You abandoned indifference when you crawled out of the grave. No pawn you. Time to decide what piece you are because the game is already in play. And Laura?” She invades the last of the space separating them, pitch black eyes boring into hers as the thigh stench of gun smoke and carrion envelop them. “We are losing.”


	7. Sin and Sun

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which a game is played (winner inconclusive), much is made of who shall sleep where, and Laura does not find rest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you SO MUCH to everyone who has commented, y'all are the ones keeping this going.

**Sin and Sun**

“Woman, where in every hell do you think you’re fuckin’ going?”

The Morrigan chuckles, tapping her knuckles, thick with silver skull rings, on the dashboard. “Have you no sense of adventure anymore, Lonnansclech?”

“Not when I can feel every bump on this shit road from my head to my ass,” Sweeney growls.

“No one asked you to go shot for shot with the god of wine,” the Morrigan says reasonably, as she turns the beaten up Chevi down another Kentucky highway. The car had just been there when they exited Ill Cuore. Laura had wanted to leave enough that she hadn’t questioned it. “There are consequences to everything.”

Yes, there were. “You’re pretty chillax for a war goddess losing a war,” Laura says.

“Am I now?” The Morrigan steers them off the highway. “I suppose I have always possessed a sunny disposition.”

“Bullshit,” Sweeney grunts. “You got a disposition like a Rottweiler with rabies. You’re just preening for present company.”

“Corpse – you want to switch seats with the bleater up here?” the Morrigan offers. Her eyes catch Laura’s in the rearview. “Have us a proper chat?”

Laura isn’t sure what she’s going to say, but Sweeney slams his hand on the dashboard. “Pull over and find a damn hotel. I’m not sleepin’ while you drive us into the Atlantic.”

The Morrigan tsks, and then gives an exaggerated sigh. “Very well, you massive overgrown toddler. But don’t take me to task for the accommodations.”

Sweeney leans back, but not before Laura catches a glimpse of his face in the sideview mirror. He looks neither petulant nor tired. He looks wary, and older than he’s ever seemed. His eyes drift, but she looks away before he can meet hers.

The war goddess pulls into a stop that holds a motel, a bar, and a liquor store. “Well, children, this is the best mother can do on short notice,” she crows, throwing the door open. Sweeney gets out and walks more steadily than a man who drank half the contents of a wine deity’s shop should have managed towards the bar, a dilapidated affair labeled “The Blazer,” in dim neon lights.

“Och, so predictable.” The Morrigan shakes her head. “And here I was hoping I’d be a good influence on him.” She slides her gaze over to Laura. “But maybe that’s your job?”

Laura’s cold body clenches. “I’m not responsible for him.”

The Morrigan doesn’t speak, merely raises her brows to let the unspoken question hang. Laura wants to conjure up a pithy response or throw a punch. She ends up breaking eye contact and striding off after Sweeney. She can’t hear anything behind her, but it still feels like she’s being laughed at.

She finds him easily enough, already a pint deep, taking up half the bar with his long legs spread wide and his elbows perched to claim his space. “Can gods get alcohol poisoning?” she asks when she draws level with him. “Asking for a friend.”

Sweeney just lifts his glass to his lips, eyeing the pool table without seeing it. “Probably easier ways to take us out and push your clock back.”

“Maybe. But what’s the point in a second shot at life if I can’t get experimental?”

It was low hanging fruit, ripe for any number of vulgar comebacks. Laura only realizes she had done it intentionally, that she was trying to get him to rise – ok, sink—to her level like he always did, when he refuses to bite. He sets down his drink – empty – and nods at the pool table. “Know the game?”

“It’s not exactly rocket science.” She takes in the patrons – two youngish guys in plaid in the midst of a game, an old man arguing in hushed, thickly accented tones with the broken jukebox, and a bearded man in black shirt and jeans, leaning against the wall in such a way you could tell he had a gun under his denim jacket. “Are you looking to win?”

Sweeney huffs. “Not in my cards lately, is it, DeadWife?” He strides off towards the table and picks up a cue. “Mind if I join?” he announces loudly.

The two youngish guys look him up, feet to head, and decide that they do not mind. Laura watches him play – he’s good, which hardly surprises her, but he doesn’t win as handily as he should considering. She finds herself inching closer, and his score improves. The men are playing for low cash, but as their singles drain, the two guys share a look. “Um, we’re good, man,” says the one in blue plaid. “Nice game.”

“Buggering off?” Sweeney insinuates, in a tone that clearly begs for them to take offense. The guys exchange another look, and then the one in red plaid shrugs. “Guess so? Cool accent, though.”

Sweeney growls as they leave, and Laura draws up next to him. “Thanks ever so, Lady Luck.”

“I’m sorry, did you want to keep losing?”

“Wasn’t the point,” Sweeney says, _still_ not looking at her. Laura is angry, she realizes. “Well forgive me for offending your masculine dignity by helping.”

“Is that what you’ve been doing?”

“You’re walking, talking, and smelling like a distillery, aren’t you?” she states. “I’d say that could earn a girl a little gratitude.”

“Not how we operate though, is it?” Sweeney contests. Laura isn’t angry now. She’s properly pissed. “Fuck you. You killed and brought me back first, Ginger Minge. You don’t get to opt out because you’re having readjustment turbulence.”

“I’m having—” Sweeney turns to her then, finally. If he’s angry, at least he’s fully here. “You have no _fuckin’_ idea what you’ve done, as per usual. When you—”

“Ah, my two lovebirds.” The Morrigan breezily interrupts them, and Laura and Sweeney are united in their glares. “Ooh.” The goddess pretends to shiver. “Frosty reception. Trouble in paradise?”

Laura opens her mouth, and then immediately clamps a hand over it as she feels the tell-tale rising gurgle. Sweeney catches her gaze, and the naked worry and sympathy there just makes her desiccated guts roil worse. She whirls and runs towards the bathroom, the Morrigan’s airy, “Something not agreeing with you, darling?” chasing after her.

Mercifully, or perhaps due to the lucky coin in her chest, Laura reaches the toilet in time to properly pay homage to the porcelain god. She’s trembling by the time the bugs have exited her system. Rolfing up maggots is getting old really fast.

She raises herself on shaky legs to walk to the dingy sink. The mirror is cracking and surrounded by posters and cards for bands she has never heard of. Looking at her reflection takes more effort than she’s prone to admit.

The film is creeping back into her eyes, and her pallor is more grey than white. Whatever juice killing Argus and the whims of the loa supplied is running out. Now that she’s alone, she finally lets herself think it—what she’ll have to do to stay somewhere within the realm of alive. She had been so close to plunging that thorn into Zia’s heart. Even when Bromius had let Sweeney go, she had wanted to do it. She knew how it would feel; that rush, the immediate revivification of her nerve endings, the beat of her heart rushing blood through backed up veins. She had been angry at Zia and Bromius, they had attacked them, and she’d fought back. But when it ended, she had still wanted to do it. 

What does that make her? She was already a killer of gods and god-goons, but before she had always done it to help someone else. Or had she? Maybe she had always been that selfish, she was finally just being honest about it.

And what other option does she have?

_And you think_ killing _a god the only way to go about it?_ The Morrigan’s implication plays over and over in her mind as she eyes her fraying autopsy scars. She doesn’t want it to make so much sense, but the pieces keep adding up. The loa were gods of death and sex. They had been able to give her a brief taste of life. It was kissing Shadow that made her heart first beat. She had thought it meant true love, but maybe it was something else? Shadow was caught up in all this, the reason behind her death, the casino heist failure, all of it. Why was he so important to Wednesday? 

_Your man came, saw you, tasted death on your tongue, and left. He ain’t your man anymore..._

Laura runs her fingers down her chest, over the stiches that hold fast her insides. Even if — _being_ with Shadow _could_ cure her, he wasn’t exactly an option. _Then who is?_ She didn’t like how the voice in her head lilted and rolled as it said it. 

She wipes her mouth with paper towels, not risking the water, and opens the door. There are a few more patrons crowding her way, and she resists shoving the heavyset man and chain-smoking woman who block her path. She can’t see past either, but she hears Sweeney and the Morrigan arguing.

“—Brigitte will throw you out on your arse the moment you set foot in Coq Noir,” he rumbles.

“It’s my arse to break,” the Morrigan replies. “Why so hesitant to let me see our long-lost sister?”

“Why so eager for the family fuckin’ reunion? You never cared before.”

“No, _you_ never cared,” the battle-goddess snaps, her voice dropping low, so that Laura inches closer to the thin woman, smoke seeping into her mouth, to listen. “And that’s the crying shame.”

“Done away with shame,” Sweeney says curtly, “dumped it overboard along with all the rest when I shipped out.”

The heavyset man moves aside, but Laura hangs back, watching the gods from the shadows.

“Oh, sure,” the Morrigan says with infinite sarcasm. “Next you’ll tell me you don’t fancy the corpse. You know the expression “jump her bones” was always meant to be metaphorical—”

Sweeney slams the pool cue down so hard it dents the floor. “What would it cost you to shut the fuck up?”

“More gold than you hold, Sun King.”

Sweeney tries to turn away, but the raven-haired deity grabs his arm. She is stunningly strong; Laura can see him straining against her grip. “It’s the solstice tomorrow night.”

“The fuck of it?”

The Morrigan hisses, hackles rising. The overhead lights flicker, and the jukebox starts playing Conway Twitty. “Don’t pretend you’ve forgotten, Lamfada. You can feel the pull—the earth doesn’t stop turning for belief, so the power is always there. If you were to celebrate in the old way—”

“Ní arm mé chun tú a chaitheamh, Mor-Rioghan. Ní hí do láir goir í.”

“Is láir goir mé,” the battle-goddess seethes, and the light to their left pops and shatters. “Ná labhair faoi na rudaí nach dtuigeann tú.”

“Hey—Ginger Minge.” Laura strides into the light before she loses any more of us. “You and The Craft here are scaring the locals. Not that I care,” she shrugs, gesturing to the scared, resentful glares they are drawing from everyone except Jukebox Man, “but this _is_ concealed carry country, so make it a conscious decision.”

Despite her bravado, Laura isn’t exactly sure she wants to get involved in a donnybrook – not when her limbs are less than secure. The two Irish gods stare daggers at each other for a few more tense seconds, and then Sweeney shrugs. “Fuck if I care,” he mutters. “Beer tastes like piss here anyhow.”

“You look tired,” the Morrigan says to Laura, and for once it’s free of venom – just a statement of fact. “Let’s see if they have any rooms next door to accommodate you and the giant.”

They follow the Morrigan into the motel, where she brightly greets the unsuspecting blonde on call. “Lovely night, isn’t it, darling?”

The woman, early twenties at most, does a double take when they walk in. “Um…yeah. Okay. You’re here to check in?”

“Yes indeed,” the battle-goddess says. “One room, please.”

“Two fuckin’ rooms,” Sweeney mutters.

“Two fuckin’ rooms,” the Morrigan gamely tells the woman, leaning forward to waggle her brows. “We’re in for the night.”

“Oh…” The blonde glances from the Morrigan’s leer, to Sweeney’s glower, to Laura’s dull, filmy eyed stare. “Okay. So, we have one single and a double room available. One hundred and one twenty-five—"

“Perfect!” The Morrigan trills, tossing down a wad of cash. The blonde examines it; there is a bit of dark red staining the edges. “Ch-checkout is at ten. You’re responsible for any fires, leaks, or damage to the bed.”

“Ooh, we’ll have to all be quite careful then.”

Sweeney grabs the keycards and stalks away before the Morrigan can make the blonde’s eyes pop any further out of her skull. “Swear to every fuckin’ god—”

“Hey.” Laura lays a hand on his arm, and he immediately stills. “I need to – I need to ask—”

“Such a poor _sport_ he’s become,” the Morrigan asserts, and Laura pulls her hand back like it’s caught fire. “A few more moments and that little huir would have been up for anything. Ah well. This place is a kip and a half. Hope the bed is nice and big.”

“Which bed?” Laura asks. The Morrigan’s dark lips split into a huge grin and Laura immediately regrets asking. “Oh, you’d like to share, would you? Braid each others’ hair and talk about boys?”

“You want to bunk with this one?” Sweeney snorts. “Suppose if you like the smell of molting carcass it’s all the same to you.”

Laura turns on him, but the Morrigan gets there first. “Oh?” she purrs. “You’ve been with her long enough—acquired the taste, have you? Well, if you both want the larger bed, I won’t stand in your way—”

“You know what?” Laura cuts in. “Since you two get along so fucking well, why don’t you share a room? That way, no one is subjected to my _molting carcass_ , and I don’t have to listen to you two bitch at each other in Irish like the world’s worst foreign exchange students all night.”

Laura holds out her hand for the keycard. Sweeney drops it in her palm, and finally meets her gaze. Despite his words, there is no disgust in his brown eyes, not even anger. Laura knows what he was trying to do, and she resents it, almost as much as she resents the briefest sense of warmth, like a ghostly memory, that rises in her cheeks.

She breaks his gaze in time to see the Morrigan's expression. Her shit-eating grin could take Sweeney for all the cash in his horde. "Pleasant dreams, a leanbh."

Laura walks away without replying, finds room 124, and locks herself inside. Sparse is too kind a word for it; the bed is barely bigger than a twin, the bathroom has green stains in the shower, and the TV doesn't work. The bar is fully stocked, though, not that it's of any real use to her. 

Laura paces around for a bit. She doesn't actually need sleep, so this is all rather pointless. Eventually, she splays out on the bed for the fuck of it, wishing she had thought to buy another pack of cigarettes. She closes her eyes and thinks of darkness. 

But it’s green she sees.

The ground is wet and verdant, soft beneath her bare feet. Climbing roses war with drooping wisteria, making heady, fragrant veils of violet and scarlet that she pushes aside as she walks forward. The vines are both in bloom and rich with grapes, and move slowly, like undulating snakes, as she passes.

She hears soft laughter and looks to her right. Bromius is sitting on a throne of woven willow and myrtle bows, his hair longer, a crown of ivy adorning his head. He is leaner, younger, and his eyes gleam brightest amethyst as he takes her in. His groupies cluster around him in diaphanous robes of purple, hair wild, chuckling as they sip from cups of gold. “Vide,” he whispers to them, and his voice is an electric guitar solo and the crooning of the first singer you fell in love with. “Videre pulchellus anima mea. Sed id quod fit in vere et mortui sunt?”

He catches her gaze and Laura can taste whiskey and see stars. A leopard, massive and beautiful, stalks towards her on padded paws. She feels fear and awe, as the great creature stops before her. She reaches out her hand, and the great cat buts its head against hers. Its purr rumbles through her skin. She strokes its soft head, and when it leads her deeper into the wilds, she follows.

Wisteria and ivy give way to reeds and poplar trees. The ground grows wetter, and Laura wades through blooming lotus flowers and heliotropes. A whip snake curls around her ankle and then darts away. The tiny island rises from the water, and beneath a date palm, surrounded by red yucca and Jericho roses, stands the queen.

“Hello, Eagle Point.”

She is clothed in jewels, beads of lapis and carnelian falling from her hips and neck, a crown of golden leaves adorning her forehead. In her hand she holds a date, or a fig, or an apple.

The leopard trots up to Bilquis, who lays her other hand upon its head. It sits contentedly on its haunches, as the goddess eyes Laura from beneath gold dusted lids.

Laura feels a sense of reverence in her, alien and uncomfortable, and she fights past it to find her voice. “I thought the dead didn’t dream.”

Bilquis tilts her magnificent head, the leaves jingling. “Is that what you are?”

Laura frowns. “I’m literally decaying.” She lifts her hands to show the goddess her graying skin, pulls at her shirt to show her scars. For a moment they are there, clear as day. Then, like a shadow passing over a field, she can see unmarred skin, lines of gold where stitches had held her in place. “What the fuck…”

Bilquis hums a laugh, and Laura looks up at her. “Did you do that?”

“I?” She raises a brow. A serpent curls in the roots of the tree. “So many choices have been made for you, Eagle Point. I would not take this one from your hands.”

“What choice?”

The leopard continues to purr. The ground pulses beneath Laura’s feet. When Bilquis next speaks, her signature hushed voice is particularly sibilant. “There was a rite, in the days of old, when I was queen. To make a King was something only the goddess could bestow—with her favor. Such love as she would give granted him his power.” Bilquis examines the apple, now red, now yellow, her golden eyes lost in ages past. “I asked him to banish the snake that could not be charmed from the roots of my tree; to kill the bird of fire in its branches; and to banish the dark maiden. This he did. He made me my throne, and I set him upon it.” There is a tremble in the goddess’ lip, a profound sadness that is so nearly human Laura wants to reach for the golden deity. There is more to the story, something blink-and-you’ll-miss it important, but Bilquis’ eyes refocus and when they turn on Laura, she can smell frankincense and fresh water. The queen extends her hand, offering the fruit. “What price will you ask, I wonder?”

Laura steps forward, one, two, three. She reaches out her hand, and when those dark fingers touch hers, she feels a warm tug in her gut that is the opposite of death. She takes the fruit, and when she touches it to her lips, it is as red as blood.

The first bite is tart and sweet and fresh. The juice slides down her throat, and Laura can feel lust rising in her like the first sap. Her eyes flutter in ecstasy, and when she opens them, she catches a glimpse of herself in the clear water. Her hair is vibrant auburn and curly, her eyes alight with mischief and hope. She leans down, and the water ripples. She is paler than death but glowing, her scars lines of gold, her eyes moon-white.

“Ní féidir leat cinneadh a dhéanamh fós cé tú féin?”

His voice is low and amused, and she feels the ground shift as she turns. Where he stands the water has turned to emerald grass, the trees from palms to oak and ash. Its cooler when she steps up onto his shores, so she can’t account for the heat that fills her skin. “I told you I can’t understand when you talk like that.”

He grins, wide and wild. His hair is his mussed mullet, and then curly, and then it’s a perfect tangle of braids. He’s wearing his shirt and suspenders, and then a robe of crushed green velvet, and then nothing at all above the waist, blue woad extending in whorls across his massive chest. “S’fine then,” he says. “Havin’ trouble making the distinction myself.”

She reaches out, and realizes she’s offering him her half-bitten apple. He cocks a brow and accepts it. He takes a massive bite, eyes never leaving hers. When they darken, she stretches out her hand.

He grabs it and pulls her in, flush against him. Her hand goes to his chest, running up the slashes and whorls of blue, to touch his throat. She feels him swallow. Her hand wraps around his Adam’s apple, and he allows it, just watching her. There is power coursing through him, a strength that was never there before. Her fingers drift, from the throat to the neck, up into his hair. She brings him down to her level.

The kiss is fast as a striking pit viper – one second, she’s open mouthed and inviting, the next captured by his lips and teeth. It burns and bruises, and she digs her fingers into his auburn mane and fights right back. The rhythm is less give-and-take and more claim, rip, soothe, claim again. His hands run up her back, and if she had clothes on (she can’t remember) they’re gone now. He lifts her from the hips, as if she weighed nothing, as if she were as slight and easy as her frame suggests. She feels every inch of him as she goes up, and moans into his mouth as her arms wrap desperately about his shoulders.

He pivots them, carrying her into the forest, beneath the oak and willow, where shadows block the sun. When she breaks for breath (she needs it?) his face is limned by fire. “S—” She wants to cry his name, but the ones she has are all wrong. His mouth traces her chin, and she arches beneath him as he lays her down. She tightens and stretches, nails scratching at his back as his beard scratches her throat and breasts. She watches him kiss down her navel, almost to her core, and whimpers when he chooses to come back up. His hands entwine in her hair, which is brown, which is red to match his, and his kisses are rough and insistent. “A chuisle,” he whispers heatedly in between passes at her mouth that leave her keening. “Mo mhuirnín dílis.”

“I…told you,” she gasps, her legs winding around his waist, her pulse thrumming like a hummingbird’s heart. “I don’t…understand—”

Her next gasp wrenches her awake, to dry sheets and cold skin and unbeating heart.

She curses.


	8. A Council of Queens

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And now, dear reader, we shall take a moment to see what transpired behind the curtains before our wayward heroes were reunited.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you again to everyone reading this! Since it sadly looks like Sweeney might stay dead in the upcoming season, I imagine I'll have plenty more updates here, to let out all my frustration over my MadWife lack

**A Council of Queens**

The house is massive in a way that would usually be tasteless. But its owner (lady, queen, mistress, hostess extraordinaire) is incapable of anything but the most exquisite class. On this night, she had dressed herself in rich violet organza and set out a spread fit for three queens—colcannon, mulled cider, spiced saffron rice and homemade beer, and petite fours that wouldn’t be out of place in Buckingham. Of course, Ostara mused, there was a high probability that the luscious contents would end up on the floor or the walls if it came down to battle—it was why she hadn’t bothered with her best china.

“I hope I don’t need to tell you ladies to _behave_ like ladies here. This is meant to be neutral ground.”

The queen on the left laughs, wild as her black hair, and fingers her knife. “If I had come to make your pretty manor a killing field, I wouldn’t have bothered putting on my fancy leathers. And why would you think we three sovereigns couldn’t come to a compact?”

The queen on the right barely raises her brow, but her stillness is its own answer. Her dark skin is set to advantage by the bloodred of her gown, matching the apple in her right hand. “War and love make difficult bedfellows.”

The Morrigan cawed a laugh. “Please. Was there not a time when you strapped on your sandals and took up the mace, to crush those who rebelled against you, and split their city walls? The poetry your love and wrath inspired was the first to be known from the mouths of women.”

“I made a bargain to hold my throne,” Bilquis answered, and the air seemed to hum with the pounding of feet, the clash of knives, the wailing of women. “I became what men wanted, to supply what women needed, and the price was greater than I could have known.”

“At least you fought,” Morrigan said. “Better than whittling yourself down please them and serving at their feet like some.”

Ostara narrowed her ice-blue eyes. “Careful, Battle-Crow. You’re on my land now. You have no sovereignty on these lawns.”

“And manicured to perfection they are,” the war goddess observed. “Don’t you yearn to let loose? To feel the rush of power that comes with standing as you once were, unabridged and unshackled, feared and beloved?”

“Someone else served me up that line not too long ago,” Ostara shot back with sass enough to melt butter. “What makes your version any sweeter?”

“Call it the feminine touch,” the Morrigan purred. “Isn’t that what this world needs to right itself?” The Morrigan jerked her head at Bilquis. “I know it’s why this one hasn’t signed on to either side.”

“You speculate on my motives,” Bilquis uttered, soft as water from a desert fountain. “You do not discern them.”

“I discern enough.” The Irishwoman began stalking about the grand parlor, boots click-clacking on the marble floor. “You didn’t come to this land – this brazen, imperial, ridiculous, bound and free land – just to convalesce and drain the seed of the lonely and reckless. Ambition doesn’t abandon us when we’re brought low; it festers. It’s turned old One-Eyed and his sworn brother into something more twisted than in their ages of glory. But you—” She pointed directly at Bilquis, a rude gesture only another queen could get away with – “you’ve never forgotten where we come from. Or what we owe those who birthed us.”

Bilquis tilted her head, her glorious mane of hair kissing her shoulders. “What are you proposing, Phantom Queen?”

“The boys are playing with pawns, bishops, and knights. Their strategy may be complex, but they cannot move as we can—the king directs, but he is weak when faced head on. He is vulnerable. And if we can get to the other side of the board, well...the game is flipped.”

Ostara frowned. “I’m sorry—is this a metaphor for chess or checkers?”

The Battle-Crow bared her teeth and tasted the tip of her knife. “Whichever one lets us transform a pawn into a queen.”


	9. Revelations A rúnsearc

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Merry Christmas! I'd been working on this chapter for a minute, but as you might expect...things been rough. But I do note EVERY single comment and like from y'all, so as long as you keep reading, I'll keep updating!

**Revelations A rúnsearc**

“The fuck are we stoppin’ for now?”

The Morrigan waves her hand dismissively at Sweeney and titters as she pulls the car up on the side of the West Virginia road. “Gas is low. That’s what comes of traveling like a mortal being. Was less trouble when we used horses.”

“Not when they threw you off,” Sweeney snipes. “That was a sight.”

“No horse ever threw me—you staked the poor beast and it _died under me,_ you wretched bastard.”

Sweeney pauses, and then barks a laugh. “Fuck. That I did. Had forgotten that.”

The Morrigan reaches over and raps her knuckles on his head, waggling her brows in the mirror at Laura. “Bells rung sense clear out of this one’s head.” She pauses. “You look wrung out, corpse.”

Laura lifts a finger to flip the goddess off and claps her hand over her mouth. Shoving open the door she stumbles out, bends over, and retches. The worms slide up out of her gullet, wriggling, more alive for how dead they prove her to be.

His shadow blocks the last harsh rays of the dying sun, which is probably good considering if she’s this far gone, she’s likely to start peeling. 

“You a’right there?”

His voice is gruff, but he’s asking the question genuinely, as if the answer isn’t obvious. She should be calling him a moron for it, should tear him a new asshole for the uselessness of his pity and sympathy, but for once she’s not so inclined.

Luckily, the goddess with them isn’t. “Saints and gods and your mother’s teeth, Longhand, your brains can’t be that for shit. Alright? She’s a walkin’ autopsy doll, a CSI special complete with the rotting stench. If we don’t get her some manner of fix, we might as well dump her into some poor bastard’s corn field to compost.”

Sweeney rolls his eyes skyward as he rounds on the other deity and Laura swears she can actually hear his patience snap like a wire. “If you’d driven us straight down to New Orleans from the fuckin’ start—”

“You could have taken us all there in a trice, if you hadn’t been such a gods-blasted firedrake about your precious horde—”

“Oh, the more I know you want in, Morrigan, the more I know not to let you get one bloody paw—”

Laura heads off their rising donnybrook by spewing up another torrent of maggots. 

“Get her into some damn shade at least,” the Morrigan proposes, jerking her head towards the woods three feet to the right. “Watching a lady molt in public just seems downright undignified.”

“Like you give two shits about dignity, ladylike manners, or anything done in public,” Sweeney fires at her. 

Laura braces her hands on her knees, gasping, and closes her eyes. She can feel him bend down. 

“C’mere,” Sweeney offers, his hand on her elbow. It’s gentle, offering not goading, a promise of aid without expectation. 

Laura rips her arm away so hard it threatens to tear her stitches. “Fuck off,” she snaps. She whirls around and stomps towards the trees, refusing to check and see if she’s shedding any additional bits. Even a corpse has her pride.

“She needs an infusion of somethin’ to keep those bones together,” she hears the Morrigan observe tauntingly.

“The Baron can do it for her in New Orleans,” Sweeney responds, and the Morrigan chases it with a laugh. “The Baron can do _her_ for it in New Orleans,” the war goddess shoots back. “But we’re a ways away from the Crescent City.”

Laura shivers, even though she’s melting, and increases her pace to get to the woods. But his legs are longer than hers.

“You tryin’ to lose a limb out in the backwoods, Dead Wife? Suppose that has a certain kind o’ poetry to it, and it’s not as if anyone in this shit-kickin’ town would notice—”

“God, could just _not_ follow me?”

Sweeney pauses—she can hear it. She gets a few steps further into the forest before he says, “I had stopped followin’ you, if you recall. I had stopped completely. Yet somehow, here I am.”

Laura swallows hard, which he does not see, and her voice is crisp as she shoots back, “You’re welcome.”

“Oh, was that meant to be for me?”

At _that_ , she whirls around. “The fuck is that supposed to mean?”

Sweeney gives a vicious half-smile that shows teeth. “You askin’ me to buy that out-for-her-own-crumblin’ bones Ms. Moon did a selfless act?”

“Fuck you, GingerMinge—if I knew this was the thanks I’d get, I would have left you in the ground.”

“So you did it for my gratitude, then?”

“I did it—” Laura glares at the ground, the trees, anywhere but his smug face. “Look, I don’t even know _how_ I did it. Okay? But why are you complaining? Did you have somewhere better to be?”

Sweeney’s eyes glaze over and Laura has never seen anything like the shadow that veils his features. “Now you’re interested in askin’ questions? Never thought I’d see the day.”

“You’re only seeing anything because of me,” Laura fumes. Sweeney snorts. “And you want me to kiss the ground your fetid hide blackens for it, I suppose? Shouldn’t be surprised, DeadWife, that you’d force a man’s hand and then expect him to grovel for the privilege—that’s your game from the off—"

“You. Don’t. _Know._ Me!” Laura explodes. She had been annoyed. Now she’s furious, and her knuckles itch to bruise the leprechaun’s judgmental jaw.

Sweeney moves with a swiftness that belies his immense size – one second, he’s ten paces from her, the next he’s up in her face, giving no quarter, no room for her to look away. “Oh no? I watched you for weeks before your little caper went belly up. Know what I saw? Someone so caught up in their own lies they could barely see up from down. I saw you playin’ house with your man—acting like you loved him, as if that would make it true. As if you weren’t always one bad day away from crashing your car without any help from me. You barely fuckin’ fought when he offered to take the fall for you, and could barely get your heart rate up fuckin’ his piece-of-shite friend. What I know? I know you couldn’t find a reason not to betray him because you betrayed yourself so much you didn’t know what faithful was. I know you wanted to love him so badly you almost did, and when he was gone you went lookin’ for it outside, ‘cause inside you couldn’t find anything worthy of it. And when that manky cat keeled over you stopped thinkin’ of earnin’ it or getting’ it and started lookin’ for reasons to throw it away. You wanted him to know you’d abandoned him when he came back – wanted to see if he’d curse you or debase himself enough to forgive or forget, and either way prove that love was all bollocks, that nobody ever truly felt it and that that was the reason you were always alone. I know you, Laura Moon.”

“McCabe.”

Sweeney’s brows perk up, and Laura is almost as surprised as he that that is what comes out of her mouth. She can still feel her rage, just about the only thing left fueling her, and if she could blush her cheeks might show something almost akin to shame. But more than anything, his words have left her with a need to show him that he _doesn’t_ know all of her, that he _didn’t_ just expose every aching inch of the soul she now unfortunately knows for a fact exists; that he can’t just stand there and decree himself the arbiter of her worth when he doesn’t even know her real name.

“Laura Emily McCabe.”

She repeats it, and knows she’s made the right choice, because some of the righteous anger drains from his face, replaced by a sense of shock, wariness, and what might, just possibly, be awe. When he speaks, his voice is newly rough. “You tellin’ me your full, true name there, Laura Emily McCabe? Sure you want to be doin’ that?”

She’s not, really. But the look in his eyes—blown off course, intense, as if she’s given him something delicate and precious—is well worth the risk. “I know what I’m doing.”

“That’s a fuckin’ first.”

 _Well, there might as well be another,_ Laura thinks, and doesn’t think beyond that as she goes up on her tip toes and presses her lips to his.

She knows what she’s hoping for—that instant flush, the beat of her undead heart. It surprises her how much she’s surprised when it doesn’t happen – the drop of disappointment in her stomach is the only physical sensation she feels. Still, when she draws back Sweeney’s pupils are blown, his expression already half-way to wreckage and ruin.

“So that’s what you’re after.” His voice is a whiskey-soaked whisper, and it's enough to rouse the stubborn edge within her. Laura places her cold, dead hands firmly on the back of his neck and pulls him down to meet her mouth.

He’s hesitant for a moment, then gentle, in a way she neither expects nor is sure she wants. Then his hands go to the small of her back and the back of her head. She’s reminded of his strength when he pulls her in, of her own when she grips him back. She goes flush against him, and he groans into her mouth, into her neck where he bites it. She should be worried about him tearing flesh, but she isn’t, she is too occupied with running her nails all over his arms, uncaring if she scores his skin or leaves some of her own behind.

He lifts her and she lets him, like in the dream, and her legs go around his waist. She looks down and into his eyes and she’s not sure what she sees or what he sees reflected back, but this feels so familiar that she refuses to look away, even when they pass deeper into the shade and he lowers them both down. She goes on her back willingly enough because then he’s pulling off her dress, she’s kicking off her boots, running her hands up his chest so his shirt rips and gives. He shakes off the remnants, bared before her, all solid muscle through and through. Her hand drifts up to the scar marking his chest. She’s not breathing but he is, heavily.

She rises up to her knees, her hands going through his ginger mane, and now they’re face-to-face, nose-to-nose. She can feel his pounding heartbeat thrumming in her chest, feel the pulse of him below her waist. He’s staring at her in a potent cocktail of awe and fear, as if at any moment this will fade. It’s how he looked at her before, in New Orleans, and she knows, suddenly, viscerally, that that happened, it was real, perhaps more real and true than anything since her death. She’s hit by a wave of need so immediate and intense she gasps in unnecessary air and pushes him onto his back.

He goes willingly, helping her to shuck off his pants, and his hiss when she palms him might be from the cold of her hand, but he isn’t complaining. She relishes how he arches up, squeezing his eyes closed, spitting ‘fuck’ out in a way that’s more pleading than anything else. She isn’t sure what her body can do, what it will and won’t take, but he looks at her through half-closed lids, lips about to form what might be her name, and she’s ready to take the chance.

Laura crawls atop him, nails scoring his skin, and takes him in one rough plunge. She doesn’t know what she must feel like to him; cold where she should be burning, rough where she should be slick. But as she rises up and falls to her internal rhythm, she sees no complaint in his eyes, only a rapt desperation that urges her onward. There’s _something_ there, a sense of sensation that she chases, in the way his body rises to meet hers. When his hands grip her hips, she knows they’re there before looking. She’s biting her lip, reaching down to touch his chest, his neck, where his pulse thrums. Alive. He’s alive, however it happened, and she can _feel_ it, feel the blood that rushes through his body, the tension in his muscles as he strains against and with her, his breath as he pants and gasps, “Laura…Laura McCabe. Laura. Emily. McCabe.”

It’s ripped out of him like a dying man’s last desperate prayer, needing and needed, and then her head is going back, and her back is arching up, and there is heat and light, golden and sudden like a spear through her, like the best orgasm she’s ever experienced, and she’s gasping in air, and crying out, and her heart, her heart is beating, again and again and again.

She hasn’t come down, hasn’t caught the breath she’s suddenly desperate to pull into her atrophied lungs, when his hands snake up her back and to her hip. Sweeney flips her over deftly, roughly, and she _feels_ it—her back on the grass, his hands in her hair, the weight of him on and inside her. She’s keening against him now, knees locked around his hips, open and aching. He’s relentless, a force of nature, lighting to the earth, and with each thrust her heart beats and her pulse flutters. Her nails dig into his back, suddenly strong enough to have purchase, and she feels her lips at her neck as he rides her out, old Irish spilling from them as he drives her harder into the ground. “A chuisle mo chroí…Laura…mo mhuirnín dílis…”

She recognizes it from the dream, recognizes the feeling of him within her from New Orleans, and wonders which is real, if they’re both real, if nothing is, and doesn’t care. She doesn’t care and she does, and she’s afraid and laughing, and when he tilts his head to hers, she kisses him. He tastes like whiskey and cigarette smoke and fresh summer rain. He _tastes_ , and she chases it down, kissing him as he groans and speeds up and loses control. He roars and she laughs, and her body drinks it in like sunshine, searing out all that was dead and decaying within her. When she opens her eyes they lock with his, and there is fire within them, enough to stave off her cold. She doesn’t let him go when he starts to go slack, pulling his forehead down to hers, breathing in his air, her chest against his, his scar rough against her fresh skin.

Neither of them see the crow hanging on the oak branches above them, or the twin ravens that leer from the shadows of the maple. The crow caws and dives for them, driving them off, but they go too easily. They have seen what they have seen.


	10. A Reverie

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Laura awakens invigorated, Sweeney is irritated, and the Morrigan is impatient.

**A Reverie**

Laura awakes heated and sore all over, as if she’d been hit by a very amorous freight train.

It’s amazing.

She reaches out a hand and touches the large, man-shaped depression in the thoroughly crushed grass beside her.

She sits up. “Sweeney?”

The name sounds strange on her tongue—or maybe her tongue just feels strange. It certainly got extensive use the previous night. Multiple rounds; three at least, if you counted by his orgasms. Four if by hers, though she wasn’t keen to admit he’d gotten one up on her. Once she’d ridden him to screaming completion and he’d flipped her over, it had been a half-mad battle, both trying to go as hard and as long as possible. After that first flush of power that set her heart to beating, Laura had felt capable of tearing down a wall—and she had ripped up chunks of the earth and scratched bloody lines down Sweeney’s back. He’d given just as good, going hard as a mac truck, and if she’d been alive she would have been littered with bruises. As she was, she felt invigorated, warm, and not a little piqued.

_Where the fuck is he?_

Laura won’t pretend to know the niceties of god aftercare, and she sure as shit never abided by any common standards of politesse where the morning after is concerned. But dipping out after a night of literally earth-shaking sex without a word seems rude.

She stands up, naked, and does a 360 around the forest. It’s dappled in summer sunshine, and she wonders how long she slept. She _slept_ – deep, and with no dreams. She’s not sure what it means, what any of it means, but she catches sight of two figures off to her left, beneath a willow, and begins walking towards them. The grass feels – f _eels_ – cool beneath her feet, and she is still warm. It isn’t her heart pumping blood, but there does seem to be something within her veins. As she gets closer, the two brogue-thickened voices reach her ears.

“…what a night you’ve seen, Longspear.”

“Fuck off, you old cow.”

“Och! He still speaks more like a bilge rat than a king. Suppose you’ll need another round to really fix you. She’s taking to it faster, I’ll wager.”

“Wager nothin’,” Sweeney snaps. “Don’t think I haven’t seen the shape of the game you’re plannin’.”

“You can feel it, can’t you?” the Morrigan crows. “Your gift beating at her heart-center—something old mixed with something new. Atheism married to the sweet stirrings of fresh faith. She’s perfect, isn’t she?”

“Leave her out of this, Battle-Crow. It's none of your concern."

“It most certainly is,” the Morrigan hisses. “And you know it well. You killed her, you resurrected her; you were killed, she resurrected you in blood. And now you’re her lover. You’ve heard enough ballads to know that creates something more than you both. Don’t tell me you can’t sense it, Lugh – the threads of fate entwining around you now—”

“And what are you planning to do with those threads, Weaver of Entrails?”

The Morrigan pauses, and her gaze drifts behind him, sharp eyes locking with the evesdropper. “Late night, Laura Moon?”

Sweeney whirls around as well. He at least has put back on his pants, and Laura is suddenly conscious of being utterly naked. Well, she’s never particularly given a shit about modest before, and she doesn’t intend to give the bitch-goddess the satisfaction of seeing her start now. “You were watching? Are all gods Peeping Toms, or is it an Irish thing?”

The Morrigan huffs a laugh and tosses her braided hair. “Please. Think I spent all my solstice watching you two wearing the face off each other? I saw enough to see then went my way. Speaking of way, we should be on the road before it’s midday, if we want to reach N’Awlins before the week is out.” The Morrigan grins at Laura. “But I’ll leave you two to discuss—and mayhap find where your clothes ran off to.” The goddess stalks off with another wink at Laura, leaving her alone with the leprechaun.

Sweeney glances around at the trees, busying himself with taking out a cigarette and lighting it, before asking nonchalantly, “You plannin’ on puttin’ on a show for the rest of the trip like that?”

Laura crosses her arms over her bare chest. “You’re not wearing a shirt.”

“I’m a man not wearin’ a shirt in the middle of a backwoods in trailer-park-shithole-county,” he shoots back, adding as a snide aside, “And that only ‘cause my shirt’s been torn to bits, thank you grandly.”

“You’re fucking welcome.”

Her laugh of shocked, offended pride makes Sweeney face her dead on. “Oh? Am I the one who got the power boost to turn her clock o’ decay backwards?”

“You got hours of Olympic quality sex,” Laura defends. She’s been around enough to know she isn’t an average lay. “I don’t care how many pixies you’ve fucked over your ridiculous lifespan, Ginger Minge, don’t act like you got nothing out of the bargain.”

“You can’t fuck a pixie, they’ll bite your bollocks off soon as look at ‘em,” Sweeney corrects her. “And as someone who _has_ had a roll in the hay with an Olympian, I wouldn’t go ‘round comparin’ yourself to Her Highness so blithely; we barely made it out of our last tussle with the immortals. Won’t do either of us good if Ms. Golden Apple herself construes you as a rival. And as to bargains—” Here he stalks towards her, and if she tenses below the waist, she lets nothing show in her face –“you’d do well not to go makin’ any more.”

Laura tilts her head up to eye him boldly and refuses to dwell on the thought of him buried inside her. “Why? Seems like this one worked out just fine for me.” She spreads her arms with a pretty, poisonous smile. “I’m fresh as a daisy. Back in living color.”

“Not quite, Dead Wife.” Sweeney lowers his voice as he leans in, and she might swallow. Just a bit. “And you made yourself what we fae-folk call an open-clause handshake deal. You got your end. I’ve yet to call in mine.”

The purr in his voice isn’t accidental. Neither is the hawklike focus in his brown eyes. Laura has never been intimidated by Sweeney, and if the dominance in his voice is intended to warn her off, that’s not the effect it’s having. “A _handshake_ deal?” she asks with pert, fake innocence. “Is that what the Irish called it back in your day?”

She’s rewarded with that darkening of his eyes that sends another heated flush through her body, and Laura practically swoons at her ability to _feel. S_ he takes a step towards him.

“Oi!” The harsh caw of the battle-goddess breaks through the tension. “You two fixin’ to have another round, or can we get this clown car back on the road?”


End file.
